Aunt Margret, who was not wearing her spectacles, seemed to listen for a moment as to a voice that came to her from afar, and then she asked him into the house.
As he passed through the hall he listened, in his turn, for the silvery voice he wished to hear, but he heard nothing save the sound of his own footsteps, for the house echoed like a vault. The sense of change made him forget for a moment the object of his visit, and when he stepped into the sitting-room and found the familiar room so different from what he remembered it, so bare, so bleak, so stamped with the seal of poverty (with its scrap of worn carpet on the floor and its two broken firebricks in the cold stove), he felt as if the ironical powers that controlled his fate had brought him there not to see his child but only to torture him.
After a moment the Factor came in with the old fire in his eyes and the old spirit in his step, but wearing a threadbare skull-cap over a threadbare suit that had once been black, and looking like a grey rock in a green place when the sun has gone from it, leaving it grim and hoary.
"I heard of your arrival, Mr. Christiansson," he said, "and I suppose I ought to thank you for your call, but I am an old man who has lived past his day, and I can't think why you wished to see me."
Christian Christiansson had his subterfuge ready. "Coming from London," he said, "I thought I might be able to tell you something of your daughter."
"Helga? You know my daughter Helga?"
"I used to know her, but our ways have parted, and we have met only once in ten years. Nevertheless I know all about her, and can tell you what has happened."
"What has happened, sir?"
"She has become a great singer."
"A singer, has she?"