"Is father to be in it, too?" Merle looked at him open-eyed.

"Oh, if he doesn't want to, we'll let him off. But at any rate I'll ask
him first. Goodbye." And Peer drove off into town.

In Lorentz Uthoug's big house you had to pass through the hardware shop
to get to his office, which lay behind. Peer knocked at the door, with
a portfolio under his arm. Herr Uthoug had just lit the gas, and was
on the point of sitting down at his American roll-top desk, when Peer
entered. The grey-bearded head with the close thick hair turned towards
him, darkened by the shadow from the green shade of the burner.

"You, is it?" said he. "Sit down. You've been to Christiania, I hear.
And what are you busy with now?"

They sat down opposite each other. Peer explained, calmly and with
confidence.

"And what does the thing amount to?" asked Uthoug, his face coming out
of the shadow and looking at Peer in the full light.

"Two million four hundred thousand."

The old man laid his hairy hands on the desk and rose to his feet,
staring at the other and breathing deeply. The sum half-stunned him.
Beside it he himself and his work seemed like dust in the balance. Where
were all his plans and achievements now, his greatness, his position,
his authority in the town? Compared with amounts like this, what were
the paltry sums he had been used to handle?

"I--I didn't quite catch--" he stammered. "Did you say two millions?"

"Yes. I daresay it seems a trifle to you," said Peer. "Indeed, I've
handled contracts myself that ran to fifty million francs."

"What? How much did you say?" Uthoug began to move restlessly about the
room. He clutched his hair, and gazed at Peer as if doubting whether he
was quite sober.

At the same time he felt it would never do to let himself be so easily
thrown off his balance. He tried to pull himself together.

"And what do you make out of it?" he asked.

"A couple of hundred thousand, I hope."

"Oh!" A profit on this scale again rather startled the old man. No, he
was nothing; he never had been anything in this world!

"How do you know that you will make so much?"

"I've calculated it all out."

"But if--but how can you be sure of it? Suppose you've got your figures
wrong?" His head was thrust forward again into the full light.

"I'm in the habit of getting my figures right," said Peer.

When he broached the question of security, the old man was in the act of
moving away from him across the room. But