“Wet, too? Why, what have you been doing?”
“I—I couldn’t help it,” snivelled Sivert shamefacedly. “It came of itself, when Father took the bowl....”
Hedvig drew away from him, turning up her nose in disgust.
“Ugh! You baby!”
“Mother! Is she to call me a baby now I’m grown up and confirmed?”
“Hold your noise, out there!” cried his father. “Run down to Eriksens’ and ask the time.”
Sivert hurried away, and brought back word: half-past seven.
“I must be off,” said Egholm, with an air of importance.
Mother and children looked with a shiver of dread towards the cut-glass bowl. But Egholm was quietly putting on his still dripping coat, looking at himself in the glass, as he always did. It was a game of blind man’s buff, where all save the blind man know how near the culprit stands.