Madam Neoteric

He seized the oars and rowed violently. The councilor became a little uneasy, when the water reached so high at the stern, and suggested, that they had better see about getting home again; so back they went.

“Tell me,” said the girl, when the violence of his rowing had decreased a little. “Do you often go to town?”

“I have never been there.”

“Never been there? And you only live twelve miles away?”

“I don’t always live here, I live at all sorts of places since my mother’s death, but the coming winter I shall go to town to study arithmetic.”

“Mathematics?”

“No, timber,” he said laughingly, “but that is something you don’t understand. I’ll tell you, when I am of age I shall buy a sloop and sail to Norway, and then I shall have to know how to figure on account of the customs and clearance.”

“Would you really like that?”

“Oh, it, is magnificent on the sea, there is such a feeling of being alive in sailing—­here we are at the landing-stage!”

He came alongside; the councilor and his daughter stepped ashore after having made him promise to come and see them at Cape Trafalgar. Then they returned to the bailiff’s, while he again rowed out on the lake. At the poplar they could still hear the sounds of the oars.

“Listen, Camilla,” said the councilor, who had been out to lock the outer door, “tell me,” he said, extinguishing his hand-lamp with the bit of his key, “was the rose they had at the Carlsens a Pompadour or Maintenon?”

“Cendrillon,” the daughter answered.

“That’s right, so it was,—­well, I suppose we had better see that we get to bed now; good night, little girl, good night, and sleep well.”

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