'I can't leave it alone any longer,' said his visitor. 'I ought to have spoken to you long ago, but it is hardly my place. You understand? I can't help thinking you will say to yourself: "There's Gustaf Alin, son of one of our cottagers, thinks himself such a great man now that he can order me about."' 'My dear fellow,' Hede said, 'don't imagine I think anything of the kind. My father's father was a peasant's son.' 'Yes, but no one thinks of that now,' Alin answered. He sat there, looking awkward and stupid, resuming every moment more and more of his peasant manners, as if that could help him out of his difficulty. 'When I think of the difference there is between your family and mine, I feel as if I ought to keep quiet; but when I remember that it was your father who, by his help in days gone by, enabled me to study, then I feel that I must speak.' Hede looked at him with a pleasant smile. 'You had better speak out and have done with it,' he said. 'The thing is,' Alin said, 'I have heard people say that you don't do any work. They say you have hardly opened a book during the four terms you have been at the University. They say you don't do anything but play on the violin the whole day; and that I can quite believe, for you never wanted to do anything else when you were at school in Falu, although there you were obliged to work.' Hede straightened himself a little in his chair. Alin grew more and more uncomfortable, but he continued with stubborn resolution: 'I suppose you think that anyone owning an estate like Munkhyttan ought to be able to do as he likes--work if he likes, or leave it alone. If he takes his exam., good; if he does not take his exam., what does it matter? for in any case you will never be anything but a landed proprietor and iron-master. You will live at Munkhyttan all your life. I understand quite well that is what you must think.' Hede was silent, and Alin seemed to see him surrounded by the same wall of distinction which in Alin's eyes had always surrounded his father, the Squire, and his mother. 'But, you see, Munkhyttan is no longer what it used to be when there was iron in the mine,' he continued cautiously. 'The Squire knew that very well, and that was why it was arranged before his death that you should study. Your poor mother knows it, too, and the whole parish knows it. The only one who does not know anything is you, Hede.' 'Don't you think I know,' Hede said a little irritably, 'that the iron-mine cannot be worked any longer?'