“Write first, Oskar.”
“As you please. It isn’t necessary, though. I know quite well what she’ll say. But even if she couldn’t welcome you for yourself—and why shouldn’t she?—she would for my sake, anyway.”
“All the same, write first, Oskar.”
“Very well, I will. And if her answer is all right, you’ll go?”
“Ye-s.”
“Heavens, how happy I am! What have I done to deserve to be so happy?”
Mona watches him as he goes off, with his quick step, until he is lost in the sinister shadows cast by the big arc-lamps that cut through the night. Then she goes indoors and tries to compose herself. It takes her a long time to do so, but at length, being in bed, she remembers a beautiful thing she had read to her father in the days when he lay upstairs:
“Whither thou goest, I will go. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
For days after that Mona finds herself singing as she goes about her work. And at night, when she is alone, she is always thinking of her forthcoming life in Oskar’s home. She can scarcely remember her own mother, except that she was an invalid for years, but she sees herself nursing Oskar’s mother, now that she is old and has lost her daughter.
“I mustn’t go empty-handed, though,” she thinks.