On Saturday the Captain came back home on leave. Nils said he never used to do that before. Fine and upright in his bearing he was, for all that his wife was gone away, and he was sober as could be. He gave me orders, very short and clear, about the timber; came out with me and showed me here and there. “Battens, down to smallest battens, a thousand dozen. I shall be away three weeks this time,” he said. On the Sunday afternoon he went off again. He was more determined in his manner now--more like himself. We were through with the field-work at last, and the potato-planting was done; after that, Nils and the lad could manage the daily work by themselves, and I went up to my new work among the timber. Good days these were for me, all through. Warm and rainy at first, making the woods all wet, but I went out all the same, and never stayed in on that account. Then a spell of hot weather set in, and in the light evenings, after I got home from work, it was a pleasure to go round mending and seeing to little things here and there--a gutter-pipe, a window, and the like. At last I got the escape ladder up and set to scraping the old paint from the north wall of the barn--it was flaking away there of itself. It would be a neat piece of work if I could get the barn done this summer after all, and the paint was there all ready. But there was another thing that made me weary at times of the work and the whole place. It was not the same working there now as when the Captain and Fruen were home; I found here confirmation of the well-known truth that it is well for a man to have some one over him at his work, that is, if he is not himself in charge as leading man. Here were the maids now, going about the place with none to look after them. Ragnhild and the dairymaid were always laughing and joking noisily at meal-times and quarreling now and again between themselves; the cook's authority was not always enough to keep the peace, and this often made things uncomfortable. Also, it seemed that some one must have been talking to Lars Falkenberg, my good old comrade that had been, and made him suspicious of me now. Lars came in one evening and took me aside; he had come to say he forbade me to show myself on his place again. His manner was comically threatening. Now, I had not been there more than a few times with washing--maybe half a dozen times in all; he had been out, but Emma and I had talked a bit of old things and new. The last time I was there Lars came home suddenly and made a scene the moment he got inside the door, because Emma was sitting on a stool in her petticoat. “It's too hot for a skirt,” she said. “Ho, yes, and your hair all down your back--too hot to put it up, I suppose?” he retorted. Altogether he was in a rage with her. I said good-night to him as I left, but he did not answer. I had not been there since. Then what made him come over like this all of a sudden? I set it down as more of Ragnhild's mischievous work.