They stood for a moment, smiling and measuring each other with their eyes, and then shook hands.
Together they carried the box up through the town, and Peer was so much of a townsman already that he felt a little ashamed to find himself walking through the streets, holding one end of a trunk, with a peasant-girl at the other. And what a clatter her thick shoes made on the pavement! But all the time he was ashamed to feel ashamed. Those blue arch eyes of hers, constantly glancing up at him, what were they saying? “Yes, I have come,” they said—“and I’ve no one but you in all the world—and here I am,” they kept on saying.
“Can you play that?” he asked, with a glance at her violin-case.
“Oh well; my playing’s only nonsense,” she laughed. And she told how the old sexton she had been living with last had not been able to afford a new dress for her confirmation, and had given her the violin instead.
“Then didn’t you have a new dress to be confirmed in?”
“No.”
“But wasn’t it—didn’t you feel horrible, with the other girls standing by you all dressed up fine?”
She shut her eyes for a moment. “Oh, yes—it WAS horrid,” she said.
A little farther on she asked: “Were you boarded out at a lot of places?”
“Five, I think.”