"If he would only lend us enough to satisfy the Sheriff in the morning!" said Anna.
"What's the good of expecting a man to help us to keep the farm when he has come to buy it for himself?"
"It's hard, though, cruelly hard, to be turned out of house and home by the first person who comes along with more money."
"That's what I was thinking," said Magnus.
Down to this moment Anna had only been trying to sympathize with Magnus's mood, but now something in his tone made her suspect that she had awakened a devil, and she looked at him in terror.
He took up the bottle and drank; he drank out of the neck; and there was a new devil in every drop. His eyes began to gleam with a feverish luster, and Anna trembled. She remembered that Magnus had not taken any strong drink until to-day since the day of Thora's funeral, and then she thought of her father, and a sensation of extreme cold crept over her.
"Let us not talk of it any more," she said, as she tried to put the bottle away, but Magnus held on to it.
Mother and son looked at each other again, and then Anna went over to the stranger's door and listened.
"Has he locked it?" asked Magnus.
"No, I'm afraid-- No, no, he has not."