from the wash-tub, looking
doubtfully at him. "Come here with your smutty face!" she said, hastily
pulling the clothes out of the tub. "You are so awfully black! Foreman,
did you say? No, is it really true? Oh, you must put up with a little
splashing; I can't see the foreman for coal-soot! Then Mrs. Ellingsen
didn't ask Olaves first?"

"No, she didn't."

"And no one put out their tongue or made Mrs. Ellingsen afraid of you,
as they did before?"

"Oh, Haegberg must have let her know that he hadn't taken any harm from
me."

"If only they don't begin again and do what they can. For your getting
in front of them stings and chafes and torments every one of them, ever
since that time when you had to do those wheel pivots over again for
Olaves. And then they dig up all the old stories they can find."

"Oh no! The world's right enough, I tell you, and Mrs. Ellingsen must
take the smith who works her smithy best. Besides it's as fixed as a
vice, and the contract signed this morning. And it's pretty badly
needed, for the money that mother borrowed last, it--it--whu!"--he
whistled--"has gone the same way as the rest. It disappears like smoke
with her. It seems to me she trades backwards instead of forwards, and
that the profits go the wrong way."

"Now you're so nice and clean, that you shine. That way with your hair
or else the cock's-comb will stand up too much."

"I rushed straight out of the smithy, you see, to come up here and cram
it into you. I went in to mother first, and then I promised her to go
down and buy some mackerel for supper. Two smacks have come in to-day,
they say."

Silla's face showed that this was a great piece of news. They were both
natives of the town, and the arrival of the mackerel brought with it a
number of pleasant recollections and pictures from the time when they
lived in the square down by the wharves.

She looked a little undecided.

"What if I put on my shawl and went with you!" she exclaimed. "Wait for
me down below, Nikolai, so that we don't go together in the street up
here!"

It was a proposal that it was not easy to resist, she was so eager about
it. And then he had been made foreman to-day!

She was not long in putting on her blue-striped dress and a shawl over
her head and following him.

They hastened down together; she chattering gaily as in the old days
when they had stolen out, he quite taken up with looking at and
listening to her. They walked in the middle of the r