“I hope you will excuse my daughter,” said Fru Uthoug, turning her pale face towards him and looking through her spectacles. “She is not really so wild as she seems.”
Uthoug himself walked up and down the room, chatting to Peer and asking a great many questions about conditions in Egypt. He knew something about the Mahdi, and General Gordon, and Khartoum, and the strained relations between the Khedive and the Sultan. He was evidently a diligent reader of the newspapers, and Peer gathered that he was a Radical, and a man of some weight in his party. And he looked as if there was plenty of fire smouldering under his reddish eyelids: “A bad man to fall out with,” thought Peer.
They sat down to supper, and Peer noticed that Fru Uthoug grew less pale and anxious as her daughter laughed and joked and chattered. There even came a slight glow at last into the faded cheeks; the eyes behind the spectacles seemed to shine with a light borrowed from her daughter’s. But her husband seemed not to notice anything, and tried all the time to go on talking about the Mahdi and the Khedive and the Sultan.
So for the first time for many years Peer sat down to table in a Norwegian home—and how good it was! Would he ever have a home of his own, he wondered.
After the meal, a mandolin was brought out, and they sat round the fire in the great fireplace and had some music. Until at last Merle rose and said: “Now, mother, it’s time you went to bed.”
“Yes, dear,” came the answer submissively, and Fru Uthoug said good-night, and Merle led her off.
Peer had risen to take leave, when Merle came in again. “Why,” she said, “you’re surely not going off before you’ve rowed Thea home?”
“Oh, Merle, please . . .” put in the other.
But when the two had taken their places in the boat and were just about to start up the lake, Merle came running down and said she might just as well come too.
Half an hour later, having seen the young girl safely ashore at her father’s place, Merle and Peer were alone, rowing back through the still night over the waters of the lake, golden in the light and dark blue in the shadows. Merle leaned back in the stern, silent, trailing a small branch along the surface of the water behind. After a while Peer laid in his oars and let the boat drift.