“I want you for my wife!” cried Pelle passionately.
Hanne laughed. “Did you hear, mother? Pelle wants me for his wife!” she cried, beaming.
“Yes, I see and hear more than you think,” said Madam Johnsen shortly.
Hanne looked from one to the other and became serious. “You are so good, Pelle,” she said softly, “but you can’t come to me bringing me something from foreign parts—I know everything about you, but I’ve never dreamed of you at night. Are you a fortunate person?”
“I’ll soon show you if I am,” said Pelle, raising his head. “Only give me a little time.”
“Lord, now she’s blethering about fortune again,” cried the mother, turning round. “You really needn’t have spoiled this lovely day for us with your nonsense. I was enjoying it all so.”
Hanne laughed helplessly. “Mother will have it that I’m not quite right in my mind, because father hit me on the head once when I was a little girl,” she told Pelle.
“Yes, it’s since then she’s had these ideas. She’ll do nothing but go rambling on at random with her ideas and her wishes. She’ll sit whole days at the window and stare, and she used to make the children down in the yard even crazier than herself with her nonsense. And she was always bothering me to leave everything standing—poor as we were after my man died—just to go round and round the room with her and the dolls and sing those songs all about earls. Yes, Pelle, you may believe I’ve wept tears of blood over her.”
Hanne wandered on, laughing at her mother’s rebuke, and humming—it was the tune of the “Earl’s Song.”
“There, you hear her yourself,” said the old woman, nudging Pelle. “She’s got no shame in her—there’s nothing to be done with her!”