When it was getting towards evening, and Falkenberg was still tuning, I took a bit of something to eat in my pocket and went off for a walk, to be out of the way so they should not ask me in to supper. There was a moon, and the stars were out, but I liked best to grope my way into the dense part of the wood and sit down in the dark. It was more sheltered there, too. How quiet the earth and air seemed now! The cold is beginning, there is rime on the ground; now and again a stalk of grass creaks faintly, a little mouse squeaks, a rook comes soaring over the treetops, then all is quiet again. Was there ever such fair hair as hers? Surely never. Born a wonder, from top to toe, her lips a ripened loveliness, and the play of dragonflies in her hair. If only one could draw out a diadem from a sack of clothes and give it her. I'll find a pink shell somewhere and carve it to a thumbnail, and offer her the pipe to give her husband for a present ... yes.... Falkenberg comes across the yard to meet me, and whispers hurriedly: “She's got an answer from the Captain; he says we can set to work felling timber in the woods. Are you any good at that?” “Yes.” “Well, then, go inside, into the kitchen. She's been asking for you.” I went in and Fruen said: “I wondered where you'd got to. Sit down and have something to eat. _Had_ your supper? Where?” “We've food with us in the sack.” “Well, there was no need to do that. Won't you have a cup of tea, then? Nothing?... I've had an answer from my husband. Can you fell trees? Well, that's all right. Look, here it is: 'Want couple of men felling timber, Petter will show trees marked.'....” Heaven--she stood there beside me, pointing to the message. And the scent of a young girl in her breath.... XVI In the woods. Petter is one of the farm-hands; he showed us the way here. When we talked together, Falkenberg was not by any means so grateful to Fruen for giving us work. “Nothing to bow and scrape for in that,” he said. “It's none so easy to get workmen these days.” Falkenberg, by the way, was nothing out of the ordinary in the woodcutting line, while I'd had some experience of the work in another part of the world, and so could take a lead in this at a finish. And he agreed I was to be leader. Just now I began working in my mind on an invention.