"Nikolai! Nikolai!
"Nikolai!"—she almost choked in her hurry to speak—"Nikolai, just think! Mother, when she was unpicking my old blue dress to-day, she found the money in the lining, inside the lining, both the notes, and the silver too. I ran down to tell you directly I had taken father's dinner to the workshop. And now I'm going to the smithy, and they shall hear what they have done to you. Could you believe it! Inside the lining! I am so awfully, awfully glad"—and her eyes did look almost wild—You can't think what a grave face mother put on!"
"Just tell them at home that it's all the same to me!" said he bitterly and unmelted. But she did not notice it; she wanted to go to the smithy, and away she went.
He had no objection. But now that Anders Berg had set up for himself in Svelvig, there was no one there he cared about, to hear it. For he was a free man now!
He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, gazing over the edge of the quay at a sunken sugar-loaf, which a crowd of small boys, amid noise and clamour, were labouring to get up. It lay already half melted on the green bottom, on which the sun drew wavy lines.
Silla might try all she could to get him into the smithy. Since they had tacked the word thief on to him, he had got soaked through with salt water, just like the sugar-loaf. And besides, to stand there and slave, when he could be his own——
"Hi, you boys! I'll show you how to get the sugar-loaf up, but you will have to eat it yourselves."
The public-house—the one at Mrs. Selvig's, with the green door and white window frames, farthest down the street—had seen Holman's quiet, subdued, stooping figure come and go for many years. His grasp on the door-handle was just as precise, his walk up to the brown counter after having laid down his tools, exactly the same, though his face had a little more colour in it. He had a certain reputation there, which had allowed of his "chalking up" for several years past, and there was a regular proportion of his account, about which his inexorably correct wife had not the faintest idea—"for Holman had his weekly pocket-money."
And as usual on Saturday evenings, Silla was walking about outside with the basket, waiting for him.