'When your husband spoke thus,' said Kjeld, tenderly, 'why will you be harsher than he? Answer me, Christine--why may I not come here as hitherto? I ask for nothing more.'
The young woman's lips quivered, and her whole frame trembled with emotion, which she seemed struggling to overcome, as she replied, in a broken voice, 'Oh, Kjeld, leave off such questions. It is a sin on your part to speak in this manner to me. Go--go, I beseech you. Jan will expect to meet you down yonder with the other boatmen.'
Kjeld seemed lost in thought for a few moments; he then came close to Christine, laid his hand on her head, and tried to speak--but words failed him, and turning suddenly away, he rushed from the cottage. At the same moment the face vanished, which, from the outside of the window, had been watching the scene within.
The storm appeared to be increasing. The lamp swung, and its light fluttered in the draughts of air from the ill-secured window-frames. When Christine found that she was alone, she crouched down close to the door, as if she wished to catch the last expiring echo of the footsteps of him who had just gone. She listened, but nothing was to be heard save the roaring of the tempest, and the sound of the rain pattering against the windows.
This is a tale of the year 1808, at the commencement of that unfortunate period when Denmark, without a fleet, without an army, and almost without finances, entered into war both with Sweden and England.
Down at the shore, in one of the little bays before mentioned, the water from which was conveyed a good way inland by a broad channel that had been dug for the purpose, there lay that evening two gunboats, which a number of men were getting out into the open sea. They worked hurriedly and silently, and the little noise that they unavoidably made was drowned in the roaring of the waves, which were dashing furiously on the beach of the narrow tongue of land. The men were all armed in the same way as Jan Steffens, and seemed to obey his orders.
Jan was the principal pilot of the place, and well known as an excellent seaman. The two gunboats had been built and rigged at Fredericia, and afterwards placed under his command. They were the masters of the whole Belt, so to speak, and the previous summer they had taken several valuable prizes from the English.
At the moment in question the pilot was standing on a rock on the beach, and dividing his attention between the men's work and the black clouds above, from which the rain was pouring down in torrents. All the preparations, so energetically carried on that evening, were made for the purpose of taking by surprise an English corvette, which, for want of a pilot, had anchored in a bay near Fyen shortly before the darkness and the storm had commenced.
Just about the time that the gunboats had been hauled out to the extremity of the point, two persons approached the shore, both coming from the direction of the cottages. One was a half-grown lad, the other was Kjeld. The boy looked about for the pilot, and when he perceived him standing on the rock he hastened towards him.
Jan stooped and whispered in the boy's ear,