The menu for dinner comprises the captain's favourite dish of roast pheasants, but six o'clock strikes and the master of the house has not yet arrived at home.
"Would it not be better to postpone the dinner a little for to-day?" Katrine asks Rohritz, for form's sake. They wait one hour,--two hours: the captain does not appear. At last Katrine orders dinner to be served. Unable to eat a morsel, she sits with an empty plate before her, hardly speaking a word.
The meal is over, coffee has been served, Freddy has played three games of cards with his tutor and then disappeared with a very sleepy face.
Katrine and Rohritz sit opposite each other, each taking great pains to appear unconcerned. One quarter of an hour after another passes without a word exchanged between them. Suddenly Katrine rises, goes to the window, opens first the inner shutter and then the peep-hole in the other.
"Listen how the wind roars!" she says, in a hoarse, subdued voice, to Rohritz. "And the snow is falling as if a feather bed had been cut in two."
Rohritz is really unable to smile, as he would have been tempted to do at any other time, at the contrast between Katrine's deeply tragic air and her very commonplace comparison: he is rather anxious himself.
"Hark! just hark how the wind whistles! I hope Jack has not got wedged in a snow-drift."
Rohritz makes some reply which Katrine does not heed. In increasing agitation she paces the room to and fro.
"The worst place is the bit of road near the quarry," she murmurs to herself. "If he goes a hand's-breadth too far on one side, then----"
"Les has a remarkable sense of locality, and is the best whip I know," Rohritz remarks, soothingly.