As evening fell, Norby drove out. After supper, Einar felt a longing to confide everything to his mother, but he did not dare. What should he do in the morning? Should he flee from the affair? It seemed doubly hard now that he had staked so much upon it. He went early to bed, for he was afraid of the influences that hovered about the rooms downstairs and the people there; they all seemed to tempt him to surrender.
In his little room, the birch-wood crackled in the stove, and diffused the familiar odour of which he was so fond. A metal candlestick shone in the light from the stove, and in it stood a candle of his mother’s own moulding. He had fled from the good impressions in the downstairs rooms, and had run straight into the new ones here, that quite folded him in their embrace. The sheets on the bed, the clean curtains at the window, the recollections of all the nights he had spent here in his holidays—everything asked: “Are you really going to?”
“I shall never be able to do it,” he thought, as he lay in his comfortable bed, wrapped up in his mother’s sheets and blankets. It was very different from what he was accustomed to in the boarding-house in town. “But suppose sentence is passed on Wangen, and I might have saved him! God help me! I should never have another happy day.”
During the night Ingeborg was awakened by Einar’s coming into her room with a candle in his hand.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Hush!” he said, for there was only a thin match-boarding between her room and the one in which her parents slept.
“There’s something I must tell you, Ingeborg.” And he seated himself upon the edge of her bed with the light in his hand. At first it dazzled her, but she soon grew accustomed to it. These two had always been one another’s confidants, for Ingeborg was the nearest to her brother in age.
He spoke almost in a whisper, and she listened to him with wide-open, frightened eyes, and her breath coming quicker and quicker. She made excuses, she seized his hand convulsively, and said: “Don’t say any more, Einar! You must be mad!” But she took his hand again. She wanted to hear all his reasons, and he told her them, because he needed to have some one on his side. At length she closed her eyes as if she did not dare to look up; she breathed still more heavily; something seemed to have given way within her.
When at last he left her, she lay still with her eyes closed. She began to be afraid because it was so dismally dark, and it was such a long time to morning.