Thinka slipped her hand onto her mother's thin hand and sobbed gently into her pillow.
"Your father is no longer very strong—does not bear many mental excitements,—so that the outlook is dark enough. The attack when he came home last—"
When Ma went out, sigh followed sigh in the darkness.
Late in the evening Ma sat and held her daughter's head so that she could get some sleep; she was continually starting up.
And now when Thinka finally slept, without these sudden starts any longer—quietly and peacefully, with her fair young head regularly breathing on the pillow—Ma went out with the candle. The worst was over.
If the captain was in an exalted mood after having seen from the office window Aslak, who went as express messenger to the sheriff, vanishing through the gate, then in certain ways he was doubly set up in the kingdom of hope by a little fragment of a letter from Inger-Johanna, dated Tilderöd:
We are all in a bustle, packing up and moving to the city, therefore the letter will be short this time.
There have been guests here to the very last; solitude suits neither uncle nor aunt, and so they had said "Welcome to Tilderöd" so often that we had one long visit after another all through the summer—in perfect rusticity, it was said. But I believe indeed they did not go away again without feeling that aunt preserves style in it. With perfect freedom for every one, and collations both in the garden room and on the veranda, there is, after all, something about it which makes the guests feel that they must give something and be at their best. People don't easily sink down to the level of the commonplace when aunt is present. She flatters me that we are alike in that respect.
And I don't know how it is, I feel now that I am almost as much attracted by assemblies as formerly by balls. There certainly is much more of an opportunity to use whatever little wit one has, and they may be a real influential circle of usefulness: aunt has opened my eyes to that this summer. When we read of the brilliant French salons, where woman was the soul, we get an impression that here is an entire province for her. And to be able to live and work in the world has possessed me since I was little, and mourned so that I was not a boy who could come to be something.
I had got so far, dear parents, when Miss Jörgensen called me to go down into the garden to aunt. The mail had come from the office in the city, and on the table in a package lay a flat, red morocco leather box and a letter to me.