you! For a fellow who hasn't had
either father or mother, and since I was up at the police-station I
haven't had many companions either--" But here his emotion overpowered
him.

"Such an uncommonly pretty smith's wife you would make, Silla! If any
one has eyes for a smith, it's you; they are like sparks in the fire!
And then to come home and see only the top of your pretty little black
head at the room door! In spite of having always been treated like a
dog, and worse than that--like a thief, it would all be nothing at all,
if that was how it could end. One's own room with a lock on the door and
the chest, that would be something better than being dragged round a
dancing-hall, Silla, by fine fellows and sailors."

The last words, which were uttered in warm excitement, would have been
better left unsaid; for, from standing melted and overcome, with tears
in her eyes, she suddenly fired up against the accusation.

"Do you want to deny me a little pleasure, too, Nikolai? I'm not to see
any one, not to go anywhere. Oh no! I'm to be a girl who has never
danced, a regular queer bird, that's first been kept in a cage by her
mother, and then by----" her voice quivered, and she began to cry. "Is
that what you call being kind to me, Nikolai? You must be trying to make
me afraid of you, too!"

"Afraid of me?--of me, Silla?"

"Don't they all look upon me as a baby that's tied to her mother's
apron-strings? And now you come and want to help her, Nikolai. That's
right! That's right! Only keep me in! Oh yes, you and mother! It's only
a question of who gets the power over me. But you'd better take care,
Nikolai!"

She began to cry bitterly in impotent rage.

"Oh, well, cry away! I won't say anything. You've got some one else to
comfort you for a little while," he added moodily.

She suddenly sprang up, went up to him, and laid her arm confidingly on
his shoulder.

"Don't you _know_ that I'll be your wife, Nikolai?" she said, looking
full and ardently into his eyes; there were still tears on her dark,
freckled face.

"Well, if you will, Silla, you shall see who can work."

"But mother, Nikolai! Oh, I'm so frightened--so frightened only that
she'll get to know that we sometimes meet. She looks at me so hard every
time I've been an errand, and I've always been gone so long. But when
I sit darning and patching of an evening, I sometimes imagine that you
come in so fine and rich, and that you own the whole of Haegberg's
smith