? Your wife and
children? Hush!--better not think of that. Not that; think of anything
else, only not that.

Clothes to be carried upstairs. Yes, yes--and to think it was all to end
in your living on other people's charity. Even that can't go on long. If
you should be no better next summer--or two years hence?--what then?
For yourself--yes, there's always one way out for you. But Merle and the
children? Hush, don't think of it! Once it was your whole duty to finish
a certain piece of work in a certain time. Now it is your duty to get
well again, to be as strong as a horse by next year. It is your duty. If
only the sledge-hammer would stop, that cursed sledge-hammer in the back
of your head.

Merle, as she went out and in, was thinking perhaps of the same thing,
but her head was full of so much else--getting things in order and the
household set going. Food had to be bought from the local shop; and how
many litres of milk would she require in the morning? Where could she
get eggs? She must go across at once to the Raastads' and ask. So the
pale woman in the dark dress walked slowly with bowed head across the
courtyard. But when she stopped to speak to people about the place, they
would forget their manners and stare at her, she smiled so strangely.

"Father, there's a box of starlings on the wall here," said Louise as
she lay in bed with her arms round Peer's neck saying good-night. "And
there's a swallow's nest under the eaves too."

"Oh, yes, we'll have great fun at Raastad--just you wait and see."

Soon Merle and Peer too lay in their strange beds, looking out at the
luminous summer night.

They were shipwrecked people washed ashore here. But it was not so clear
that they were saved.

Peer turned restlessly from side to side. He was so worn to skin and
bone that his nerves seemed laid bare, and he could not rest in any
position. Also there were three hundred wheels whirring in his head, and
striking out sparks that flew up and turned to visions.

Rest? why had he never been content to rest in the days when all went
well?

He had made his mark at the First Cataract, yes, and had made big sums
of money out of his new pump; but all the time there were the gnawing
questions: Why? and whither? and what then? He had been Chief Engineer
and had built a railway, and could have had commissions to build more
railways--but again the questions: Why? and what then? Home, then, home
and strike root in his native land--we