“Ah, if I were young and rich and handsome, I'd win her all the same,” I said.
“If—and if.... So could I, for the matter of that. But there's the Captain.”
“Yes, and then there's you. And then there's me. And then there's herself and everybody else in the world. And we're a couple of brutes to be talking about her like this at all,” said I, furious now with myself for my own part. “A nice thing, indeed, for two old woodcutters to speak of their mistress so.”
We grew pale and thin the pair of us, and the wrinkles showed up in Falkenberg's drawn face; neither of us could eat as we used. And by way of trying to hide our troubles from each other, I went about talking all sorts of cheerful nonsense, while Falkenberg bragged loudly at every meal of how he'd got to eating too much of late, and was getting slack and out of form.
“Why, you don't seem to eat anything at all,” Fruen would say when we came home with too much left of the food we had taken with us. “Nice woodcutters, indeed.”
“It's Falkenberg that won't eat,” said I.
“Ho, indeed!” said Falkenberg; “I like that. He's given up eating altogether.”
Now and again when she asked us to do her a favour, some little service or other, we would both hurry to do it; at last we got to bringing in water and firewood of our own accord. But one day Falkenberg played me a mean trick: he came home with a bunch of hazel twigs for a carpet-beater, that Fruen had asked me expressly to cut for her.
And he sang every evening now.
Then it was I resolved to make Fruen jealous—ey, ey, my good man, are you mad now, or merely foolish? As if Fruen would ever give it as much as a thought, whatever you did.