“How beautiful it is!” he said.
The girl lifted her head and looked round. “Yes,” she answered, and Peer fancied her voice had taken a new tone.
It was past midnight. Heights and woods and saeters lay lifeless in the soft suffused reddish light. The lake-trout were not rising any more, but now and again the screech of a cock-ptarmigan could be heard among the withies.
“What made you come just here for your holiday, I wonder,” she asked suddenly.
“I leave everything to chance, Froken Uthoug. It just happened so. It’s all so homelike here, wherever one goes. And it is so wonderful to be home in Norway again.”
“But haven’t you been to see your people—your father and mother—since you came home?”
“I—! Do you suppose I have a father and mother?”
“But near relations—surely you must have a brother or sister somewhere in the world?”
“Ah, if one only had! Though, after all, one can get on without.”
She looked at him searchingly, as if trying to see whether he spoke in earnest. Then she said: