Then a dog was heard to bark outside, a great dull subterranean sound as if it had come from beyond the copper gates of death. All felt a shiver pass through them. Even Peter seemed to feel rather uncomfortable:
“That damned dog!” he swore. “It sounds as if the devil himself was on the way.”
Stellan ran to the window. Out in the snow he saw a shadowy figure dancing a sort of war dance, whilst throwing snowballs and lumps of ice at the furious watch-dog. Thin, lank, with high shoulders, and bare hands and head, in spite of the cold, the shadowy figure danced between the drifts.
Stellan turned to Peter:
“It must be your ... your new boarder ... he amuses himself by teasing the dog....”
“I see, is it only little Bernhard?” Peter grunted relieved. “Yes, he is not exactly a friend of watch-dogs....”
But now Hedvig’s voice sounded suddenly from the corner. She sat there looking as old-fashioned and motheaten as if she had hung herself away in a wardrobe out of pure meanness and then forgotten where the key was. Her voice also sounded strangely stuffy and dusty:
“You should never have taken up with that woman, Peter,” she mumbled. “You should never have taken up with that woman....”
Peter did not seem to have noticed her before. A shiver passed over his swollen features. Hedvig, that ghost from the time of the great fear, again raised a secret anxiety in his innermost being, right in the centre of the hard annual rings of his soul.
“Aha, is it you, you crotchety old soul?” he muttered. “You are the right person to cheer up an invalid, you are.”