They carried on like this quite a while; Eleseus was plainly in love.
"I'll write to you," said he. "May I?"
"Yes," said she.
"For I wouldn't be mean enough if you didn't care about it, you know." And suddenly he was jealous, and asked: "I've heard say you're promised to Axel here; is it true?"
"Axel?" she said scornfully, and he brightened up again. "I'll see him farther!" But then she turned penitent, and added: "Alex, he's good enough for me, though…. And he takes in a paper all for me to read, and gives me things now and again—lots of things. I will say that"
"Oh, of course," Eleseus agreed. "He may be an excellent fellow in his way, but that's not everything…."
But the thought of Axel seemed to have made Barbro anxious; she got up, and said to Eleseus: "You'll have to go now; I must see to the animals."
Next Sunday Eleseus went down a good deal later than usual, and carried the letter himself. It was a letter! A whole week of excitement, all the trouble it had cost him to write, but here it was at last; he had managed to produce a letter: "To Fröken Barbro Bredesen. It is two or three times now I have had the inexpressible delight of seeing you again…."
Coming so late as he did now, Barbro must at any rate have finished seeing to the animals, and might perhaps have gone to bed already. That wouldn't matter—quite the reverse, indeed.
But Barbro was up, sitting in the hut. She looked now as if she had suddenly lost all idea of being nice to him and making love—Eleseus fancied Axel had perhaps got hold of her and warned her.
"Here's the letter I promised you," he said.