Nikolai made a movement as if he were bringing down a hammer on the hillside. "Indeed!"
"Last Saturday in the office, when he had reckoned a krone too much in the pass-book, he said I could keep it and spend it on cakes."
"Ha! ha! Did he say that? Wonderful, how kind he is!" Nikolai said this with something that was meant for laughter. "The cook is very kind, too, when she feeds the goose so as to get hold of it!"
He stood with one arm round the gate-post, looking at her; she had grown so pretty and elegant, and almost taller since he had seen her last. "A young girl who doesn't even know that she is pretty."
Silla pouted; her whole expression was one of supercilious disavowal.
"If they offer her a cake, or a handkerchief, or a little fun, she stretches out her neck and runs up. I should think you might understand that, Silla, from all you see round you! How many of them, I should like to know, will ever come to be the wife of an honest working-man? They manage to dance a few times, and then it's all over. And they wanted to be just as kind to you now, Silla! That Veyergang is on the watch for you! If I'm not on the watch for him——" He suddenly looked pale and ugly.
"What are you thinking of, Nikolai? Don't go on like that!"
"You may well say what was I thinking of, to stand there grinding and filing away the whole month at my probation work, and then let you go up there among that pack of wolves. But I was born like that—that everything should go wrong with me!"
Silla stood, as she always did when Nikolai put on this tone, downcast and dispirited, her slender figure bending forwards, and her eyes on the ground.
"We two, Silla," he continued at length, with a shake as if of resolution, but his voice trembled—"we two have been, as it were, brought up together. And with things as they were, if they could make me go wrong, it would have been still easier for you to be twisted by them, for I was strong, you see; but you were weak, and had always to creep like a cat among lies and difficulties. And so—so—I thought that we two—who have always stood by one another—and I haven't had anyone else I could trust, as you know, Silla, and neither have you—that we should join hands. And if you're of the same mind, then——"