that she had got the money from her
stepmother; no, let any one who liked believe that, but neither Gunda
nor Jakobina did! Then Kristofa had related her wonderful adventure of
last Sunday--she was always passing through remarkable occurrences, most
wonderfully interesting, if not true to quite a corresponding degree,
in which fine ladies and gentlemen played the principal parts, and she
chanced to be the initiated one.

And now the conversation had turned upon something so interesting that
Silla listened with both her ears. There was to be dancing on Sunday
evening up at the Letvindt, and the talk was of handkerchiefs, bows, and
finery--which some possessed and others had to borrow--and of who danced
best and treated most liberally. Kristofa was able to inform them that
there was to be a violin and a clarionet, and that both students and
ordinary people and ships' officers were to be there!

Some strangers who were going over the factory came up the room, and
stopped and questioned and examined. And the young workwomen sat each in
her place, with head bent over her work, as if she had no thought for
anything but her reels.

The morning light shone with a kind of dizzy stillness in from the great
windows high up in the wall, over human beings, machinery and bales.

It was nearly twelve. The last hour always dragged so slowly, and the
smell of oil and the heat from the engines seemed to increase and become
almost stupifying.

Still a few more long stifling minutes. At last the bell rang.

And dressed, as if by a stroke of magic, the factory girls swarmed down
the steps, with their breakfast-tins in their hands, in their neat
aprons, handkerchiefs nicely tied under their chins, and knitted shawls
crossed over their chests.

Oh, the bright spring air!--to take a good breath of it! Silla, hot and
thirsty, knocked off a bit of frozen snow from the fence with her tin
and ate it.

With her head full of all that Kristofa had held out to her about the
dance at the Letvindt, she wandered down arm-in-arm with a long row of
her companions. The road out from the factory was quite crowded; lower
down it widened out, with a street-like pavement.

"Look, look, Kristofa! Veyergang has come back from England already!"
The young girls nudged each other, highly interested. "New topcoat;
light, light brown!"

"Pooh! _I_ saw him come by the steamer yesterday, him and a whole heap
of English people. They were all brown together; I