g
interfered in what was none of her business. She then received such full
information, once for all, both as to why Mrs. Holman had shut him in,
and what they had to go through daily with that boy, that Maren was
completely nonplussed. For this Mrs. Holman could stake her life upon,
that if there was any one in the house who could not stand disorder or
unseemly behaviour, it was she. She could not imagine a worse punishment
than to have it said of her that she allowed shame and depravity to
flourish in her sight.

But when Maren sat down there in the evening by the lantern on the
chopping-block, and could hear the boy screaming right from the Holmans'
room, she was not capable of going upstairs until the worst was over.
She thought she had never heard anything so heart-rending, even though
it was in the cause of justice.

Up with Maren was a kind of harbour of refuge for the boy. He would sit
there as quiet as a mouse in the corner by the wood-box, carving himself
boats, which he put under his blouse when he carried Holman's dinner
down to the workshop near the quay.

To represent, however, that Nikolai's existence was passed, so to speak,
in the coal-cellar, or under blows on back and ear from Mrs. Holman's
warm hands, would be an exaggeration. He had also his palmy days, when
Mrs. Holman overflowed with words of praise--praise, if not exactly of
him, yet of everything that she had accomplished in her daily toil for
his moral improvement.

Twice a year she had to call for the payment for him at the
Consul-General's office in the town. Nikolai, too, often had leave to go
out to the country house with the kitchen cart, which had come in to
make the morning purchases.

And there he would sit, while the cart rumbled and jolted along the
road, smart and clean, head and body respectively combed and scoured
like a copper kettle that has been cleaned with sand and lye. He could
not sit still a minute; he talked and asked questions--always about the
horse, the wonderful brown horse--whether it was the best or the second
best, if it could go faster than the railway train, or who and what it
could beat.

Then the cart turned--so much too soon--into the yard in front of the
kitchen door, and he was led through the passage by the man-servant to
the nursery.

"I hope you have rubbed your shoes? You might have had the sense, Lars,
not to bring the boy in that way, with such shoes as those!" His mother
took him and set him