“Otto Jutberg, I want to see Arne Sandstrom.”
“Arne is going to be married in a few minutes,” said Otto.
“I know he is. But I want to see Arne Sandstrom. Tell him to come here.”
“Who is it?” pressed Otto, coming nearer to her, and knitting his brows inquiringly.
“Don’t you know me, Otto, when you have been to my father’s nearly every St. John’s Eve of our lives?”
Elsa felt that she needed only one more drop to her cup, and that for some voice to raise the derisive song with which her countrymen mocked Scowneys, or inhabitants of a region the butt of all Svadia.
“A Scowen, a Scowen”—
one bar was enough to rouse sudden rage in any Svensk.
But instead of “A Scowen, a Scowen,” rising around Elsa’s ears this enchanted night, such a din of outcries was made by Otto Jutberg that people ran to look into the dining-room, and then to swarm around her.
Arne Sandstrom leaped two chairs and seriously jarred one table, to receive Elsa in his arms, when he kissed her openly.