"Not till he asks me--not till he asks me," said the Factor; whereupon Anna went indoors again and whispered over the bed of the dying man:
"Stephen, the Factor is outside, and he only wants to be asked to come in."
"He must come in on his knees then," said the Governor, and that was the end of everything.
The steamer did not arrive that night, and the bell-ringers went to bed. But at daybreak, when the fishing-boats in the bay were breaking through a veil of mist and the sunlight was glistening on the mountain-tops, the bells began to ring merrily, for the "Laura" was sailing up the fiord with flags floating from stem to stern.
Magnus heard the bells, and then a shuffling movement in his father's bedroom. A little later he heard the hurrahs of people cheering in the streets, and then a smothered echo of the same sound at the other side of his father's door.
"Hurrah!" "Hurrah!" cried the people outside.
"Hur-a! Hur-a! Hur-a-a--" echoed the voice within.
At the next moment the house shook as with a heavy fall and Magnus burst into his father's bedroom. His father lay in his night-shirt on the floor. He was dead, but his face was smiling and in his withered hands were the crinkled papers on which Oscar in his boyhood had scribbled his childish compositions.
Later the same day Magnus wrote to Oscar: "This is to tell you that our father died this morning. I think he died happy."
But the mail did not leave until the end of the week, and under Magnus's message Anna wrote for herself: "He loved you to the last, and we hav berrid him next to our dere Thora."