!

The evening breeze began to blow cool between the warm house walls. The
three who sat there enjoying the mackerel, felt as if it were a festive
night.

And foreman too!

CHAPTER XI

THE WEDDING POSTPONED AGAIN

Confined as she was, and made to work through the long evenings, while
her mother watched her like an eagle, Silla's only chance of
indemnifying herself was up at the factory.

She went about there with a suppressed longing and eager interest, her
eyes sparkling, in the midst of all the chattering, whispering and
gossiping among her different ideals--Kristofa and Gunda, active Swedish
Lena, and pert Jakobina. If she could not be with them herself, she
might at any rate hear what fun they had had, and all that had happened.
In this way she could live their life at second hand.

It was of course Kristofa who knew how to put everything in a
captivating, magic light. A little walk, a possible engagement, an
evening at a dance, everything was moulded by her busy imaginative power
into events that never wanted a hero, that interesting, mystic being,
who was seen, now with a cigar, now without one, who sometimes pretended
he did not know them, sometimes nodded, or only smiled. The person in
question might be some town gentleman or other, or some one from one of
the offices up there, who often had not the faintest suspicion that his
coming and going was seen in Bengal illumination, or that it caused such
a flutter in their hearts; though this did not preclude others from both
suspecting and taking advantage of it.

These, through Kristofa's habit of spinning, grew into little romances,
which Silla took in with wide-open eyes, and afterwards continued at
home.

Silla herself had a little romance which she kept to herself: she would
not dare to tell it to Nikolai.

She had to take care, when she went at dinner-time to buy anything for
her mother at Barbara's, that Veyergang had not gone in there on his way
down to light his cigar.

The last time she had met him there, he laughed and asked whether the
black-eyed maid wanted to run away from him? He was not so very
terrible! She had completely vanished lately. He had heard that her
mother kept her in a cage for the sake of a dangerous smith--was that
true? When a young girl had two such black eyes, she ought not to hide
them away.

And yet it was not altogether a warlike condition; but he knew very well
that she watched and waited, however long it