“I don’t always live here, I live at all sorts of places since my mother’s death, but the coming winter I shall go to town to study arithmetic.”
“Mathematics?”
“No, timber,” he said laughingly, “but that is something you don’t understand. I’ll tell you, when I am of age I shall buy a sloop and sail to Norway, and then I shall have to know how to figure on account of the customs and clearance.”
“Would you really like that?”
“Oh, it, is magnificent on the sea, there is such a feeling of being alive in sailing—here we are at the landing-stage!”
He came alongside; the councilor and his daughter stepped ashore after having made him promise to come and see them at Cape Trafalgar. Then they returned to the bailiff’s, while he again rowed out on the lake. At the poplar they could still hear the sounds of the oars.
“Listen, Camilla,” said the councilor, who had been out to lock the outer door, “tell me,” he said, extinguishing his hand-lamp with the bit of his key, “was the rose they had at the Carlsens a Pompadour or Maintenon?”
“Cendrillon,” the daughter answered.
“That’s right, so it was,—well, I suppose we had better see that we get to bed now; good night, little girl, good night, and sleep well.”
When Camilla had entered her room, she pulled up the blind, leaned her brow against the cool pane, and hummed Elizabeth’s song from “The Fairy-hill.” At sunset a light breeze had begun to blow and a few tiny, white clouds, illumined by the moon, were driven towards Camilla. For a long while she stood regarding them; her eye followed them from a far distance, and she sang louder and louder as they drew nearer, kept silent a few seconds while they disappeared above her, then sought others, and followed them too. With a little sigh she pulled down the blind. She went to the dressing table, rested her elbows against her clasped hands and regarded her own picture in the mirror without really seeing it.