The crowd broke up in little groups by common instinct. Lund and Trane went. The workmen from the factory went. All of them together.
Over between the two bushes Rothe was giving orders in a low voice. It was Henrik Vang being lifted on to a wheelbarrow. Sivert and his bosom friend, Ditlev Pløk, the cobbler's boy, were hauling each at one leg. When they came up to the level road, Sivert left the work to Ditlev, and clambered up himself beside Vang. The boy was wild with delight, and bubbling over with laughter and snatches of song. Madam Hermansen hurried up after them.
Away, away! homeward; see, the lights were lit already in the town.
The factory boys whistled like rockets, and marched in procession two and two about Petrea and her father.
The respectable citizens stepped out briskly to get warm, and laughed modestly one to another, like peasants emerging from a conjurer's tent.
The sound of footsteps died away on the path, and the last of the figures disappeared into the gloom, leaving a solitary figure still waiting on the beach--a little woman, shivering under a white knitted kerchief. It was Fru Egholm. No one had seen her come; she sat as if under a spell, watching the myriad sparks that rose in curves against the evening sky, to fall and expire in the sand.
A few weeks have passed. It is just after dawn.
Up on the beach, Egholm and Sivert are toiling away till their feet are buried in the sand, hauling away at a rope that runs through a square-cut block to the boat. They bend forward and tug till their faces are fiery red. Then at last the _Long Dragon_ yields and scrapes slowly up over the stones on to the sand. There it lies, like a newly caught fish, with a growth of shell and weed under its belly.
"Now--up with her! Put your shoulder to it, slave! That's it! Now up and bale her out."
Sivert had discovered that the water drained out of the boat from one of the tin patches, and found therefore no need to hurry, but followed with greater interest his father's operations. Egholm clambered up the slope, vanished between two bushes, and came down again laden with a sack bigger than himself. It was evidently light in proportion to its bulk, since it could be carried by one hand. In the other he held a bottle.