The captain found it so comfortable when he saw the needle and worsted flying in Thinka's hand—it was so peacefully quiet—it was impossible not to go to sleep.
And then he was going to have her for only three days.
While her fingers were moving over the canvas, Kathinka sat having a solitary meditation—
Aas had sent her a letter when he heard of her marriage. He had believed in her so that he could have staked his life on her constancy, and even if many years were to have passed, he would have worked, scrimped, and scraped in order at last to have been able to reach her again, even if they should then both have left their youth behind them. It had been his joyful hope that she would keep firm and wait for him even through straits and poor circumstances. But now that she had sold herself for goods and gold, he did not believe in any one any more. He had only one heart, not two; but the misfortune was, he saw it more plainly, that she also had—
"Huf! I thought I heard you sighing deeply," said the captain, waking up; "that comes from lying and struggling on one's back. Now we shall have some coffee."
Even if Thinka could not answer Aas, still she would try to relieve her heart a little to Inger-Johanna. She had brought her last letter with her to answer in this period of calm at home, and was sitting up in her room with it before her, in the evening.
"Inger-Johanna is fortunate, as she has nothing else to think of," she said to herself, sighing and reading:
And you, Thinka, you also ought to have your eye on your part of the country, and make something out of the place into which you have now come; it is indeed needed up there, for there is no doubt that society has its great mission in the refinement of customs and the contest against the crude, as aunt expresses it.
I am not writing this for nothing, nor wholly in the air; I stand, indeed, too near to many conditions to be able to avoid thinking of the possibility of sometime being placed in such a position. If I said anything else, I should not be sincere.
And I must tell you, I see a great many things I should like to help in. It must be that a place can be found for a good many ideas which now, as it were, are excommunicated.