“What did I tell you?” said Merle.
Slowly, with torturing slowness, the leaden-grey winter days creep by. For two hours in the middle of the day there is pale twilight—for two hours—then darkness again. Through the long nights the north wind howls funeral dirges—hu-u-u-u—and piles up the snow into great drifts across the road, deep enough, almost, to smother a sleigh and its driver. The days and nights come and go, monotonous, unchanged; the same icy grey daylight, and never a human soul to speak to. Across the valley a great solid mountain wall hems you in, and you gaze at it till it nearly drives you mad. If only one could bore a hole through it, and steal a glimpse of the world beyond, or could climb up to the topmost ridge and for a moment look far round to a wide horizon, and breathe freely once more.
At last one day the grey veil lifts a little. A strip of blue sky appears—and hearts grow lighter at the sight. The snow peaks to the south turn golden. What? Is it actually the sun? And day by day now a belt of gold grows broader, comes lower and lower on the hillside, till the highest-lying farms are steeped in it and glow red. And at last one day the red flame reaches the Courthouse, and shines in across the floor of the room where Merle is sitting by the window patching the seat of a tiny pair of trousers.
What life and cheer it brings with it!
“Mother—here’s the sun,” cries Louise joyfully from the doorway.
“Yes, child, I see it.”
But Louise has only looked in for a moment to beg some cake for Lorentz and herself, and be off again on her ski to the hill-slopes. “Thank you, mother—you’re a darling!” And with a slice in each hand she dashes out, glowing with health and the cold air.
If only Peer could glow with health again! But though one day they might persuade themselves that now—now at last he had turned the corner—the next he would be lying tossing about in misery, and it all seemed more hopeless than ever. He had taken to the doctors’ medicines again—arsenic and iron and so forth—and the quiet and fresh air they had prescribed were here in plenty; would nothing do him any good? There were not so many months of their year left now.
And then? Another winter here? And living on charity—ah me! Merle shook her head and sighed.
The time had come, too, when Louise should go to school.