The following day he called on her, but did not find her in. The janitor said she had taken a villa at Emiliekilde, which surprised Niels, for he knew that her father’s country house was in that neighborhood.
Well, he would have to go out there in a day or two.
But the very next day he received a note from Mrs. Boye asking him to meet her in her apartment in town. The pale niece had seen him in the street. A quarter before one he was to come—he must come. She would tell him why, if he did not know it. Did he know it? He must not misjudge her, and not be unreasonable. He knew her too well, and why should he take it as a plebeian nature would? He must not—please! After all, they were not like other people. Oh, if he only would understand her! Niels, Niels!
This letter made him strangely excited, and he suddenly remembered with a sense of uneasiness that Mrs. Neergaard had looked at him with a sarcastic pitying expression and had smiled and said nothing in a curious meaning way. What could it be? What in the world could have happened?
The mood that had kept him away from Mrs. Boye had vanished so completely that he could not understand how he had ever felt it. He was alarmed. If they had only written to each other like sensible people! Why had they not written? He certainly had not been so busy. It was queer how he would allow himself to be so absorbed in the place where he happened to be that he forgot what was far away, or if he did not forget it, at least pushed it into the distant background, where it was buried by the present—as under mountains. No one would think he had imagination.
At last! Mrs. Boye herself opened the door to the ante-room before he had time to ring. She said nothing, but gave him her hand in a long, sympathetic clasp; the newspapers had announced his bereavement. Niels said nothing either, and so they walked silently through the parlor, between the two rows of chairs in red-striped covers. The chandelier was wrapped in paper, and the window-panes were whitened. In the sitting-room everything was as usual, except that the Venetian blinds were rolled down before the opened windows, and as they moved to and fro in the slight breeze, they struck the casement with a faint, monotonous tapping. Rays of light reflected from the sunlit canal outside filtered in between the yellow slats and made squares of tremulous wavy lines in the ceiling, which quivered with the rippling of the waves outside. Otherwise all was hushed and still, silently waiting with bated breath....
Mrs. Boye could not make up her mind where she wanted to sit: finally she decided on the rocking-chair, and dusted it assiduously with her handkerchief, but instead of sitting down she stood behind the chair, resting her hands on its back. She still wore her gloves and had only drawn one arm out of her half-fitting black mantilla. Her dress was of silk tartan in a very tiny check matching the broad ribbons on the wide, round Pamela hat of light straw which half hid her face as she stood looking down and rocking the chair nervously.
Niels seated himself on the piano-stool at a distance from her, as if he expected something unpleasant.
“Then you know it, Niels?”
“No, but what is it I don’t know?”