"Have a little taste, Sheriff," said the captain consolingly, and they touched glasses.
"Nay, you who have a house full of comfort can talk—cushions about you in every corner—so you can export to the city—But I, you see,"—his eyes became moist—"sit there in my office over the records. I was very much coddled, you know—oh, well, don't let us talk about it. I must have my punishment for one thing and another, I suppose, as well as others.
"Isn't it true, Miss Kathinka," he asked when she came in, "it is a bad sheriff who wholly unbidden falls straight down upon you in slaughtering-time? But you must lend him a little home comfort, since it is all over with such things at his own home.
"Bless me, I had almost forgotten it," he exclaimed eagerly, and hastened, with his pipe in his mouth, to his document case, which hung on a chair near the door. "I have the second volume of The Last of the Mohicans for you from Bine Scharfenberg, and was to get—nay, what was it? It is on a memorandum—A Capricious Woman, by Emilie Carlén."
He took it out eagerly and handed it over to her, not without a certain gallantry.
"Now you must not forget to give it to me to-morrow morning, Miss Kathinka," he said threateningly, "or else you will make me very unhappy down at Bine Scharfenberg's. It won't do to offend her, you know."
Even while the sheriff was speaking, Thinka's eye glided eagerly over the first lines—only to make sure about the continuation—and in a twinkling she was down again from her room with the read-through book by Carlén and the first volume of the Mohicans done up in paper and tied with a bit of thread.
"You are as prompt as a man of business, Miss Thinka," he said jokingly, as with a sort of slow carefulness he put the package into his case; his two small eyes shone tenderly upon her.
Notwithstanding there had been slaughtering and hubbub ever since early in the morning, Thinka must still, after she had gone to bed, allow herself to peep a little in the entertaining book.
It was one chapter, and one more, and still one more, with ever weakening determination to end with the next.