"Well, I must say...." She stood shaking the earth from her dress. "One, two, three, and up!--as neatly as could be.... Look here, I'd like you to help me with something upstairs one day, will you? I want to move some things. Only we must wait till a day when my husband's over at the annexe; he doesn't like my changing things about. How long will it be before you've finished all there is to do here?"
I mentioned a time, a week or thereabout.
"To the farm just by. Grindhusen's fixed it up for us to go and dig potatoes there...."
Then came the work in the kitchen; I had to saw through the floor there. Frøken Elisabeth came in once or twice while I was there; it could hardly have been otherwise, seeing it was the kitchen. And for all her dislike of me, she managed to say a word or two, and stand looking at the work a little.
"Only fancy, Oline," she said to the maid, "when it's all done, and you'll only have to turn on a tap."
But Oline, who was old, did not look anyways delighted. It was like going against Providence, she said, to go sending water through a pipe right into the house. She'd carried all the water she'd a use for these twenty years; what was she to do now?
"Rest, indeed! We're made to work, I take it, not to rest."
"And sew things against the time you get married," said Frøken Elisabeth, with a smile.
It was only girlish talk, but I was grateful to her for taking a little part in the talk with us, and staying there for a while. And heavens, how I did try to behave, and talk smartly and sensibly, showing off like a boy. I remember it still. Then suddenly Frøken Elisabeth seemed to remember it wasn't proper for her to stay out here with us any longer, and so she went.
That evening I went up to the churchyard, as I had done so many times before, but seeing Frøkenen already there, I turned away, and took myself off into the woods. And afterwards I thought: now she will surely be touched by my humility, and think: poor fellow, he showed real delicacy in that. And the next thing, of course, was to imagine her coming after me. I would get up from the stone where I was sitting, and give a greeting. Then she would be a little embarrassed, and say: "I was just going for a walk--it's such a lovely evening--what are you doing here?" "Just sitting here," say I, with innocent eyes, as if my thoughts had been far away. And when she hears that I was just sitting there in the late of the evening, she must realize that I am a dreamer and a soul of unknown depth, and then she falls in love with me....