CHAPTER III.
Salve came out to the rock again the next autumn, after a voyage to Liverpool and Havre.
At first he was rather shy, although his father and old Jacob Torungen had in the interval, in spite of that little affair of the previous year, been on the best of terms.

The white bear, however, as he called him, seemed to have altogether forgotten what had passed; and with the girl he was very easily reconciled--she had learnt now not to tell everything to her grandfather.
Whilst the lighterman and old Jacob enjoyed a heart-warming glass together in the house, Salve carried the things up to the cellar, Elizabeth following him up and down every time, and the conversation meanwhile going round all the points of the compass, so to speak.

After she had asked him about Havre de Grace, where he had been, and about America, where he had not been,--if his captain's wife was as fine as a man-of-war captain's; and then if he wouldn't like one day to marry a fine lady,--she wanted at last to know, from the laughing sailor lad, if the officers' wives were ever allowed to be with them in war.
Her face had of late acquired something wonderfully attractive in its expression--such a seriousness would come over it sometimes, although she continued as childlike as ever; and such eyes as hers were, at all events in Salve's experience, not common.

At any rate, after this, he invariably accompanied his father upon these expeditions.
The last time he was out there he told her about the dances on shore at Sandvigen, and took care to give her to understand that the girls made much of him there--but he was tired now of dancing with them.
She was very curious on this subject, and extracted from him that he had had two tremendous fights that winter.

She looked at him in terror, and asked rather hesitatingly-- "But had they done anything to you ?" "Oh, no! all dancing entertainments have a little extra dance like that to wind up with.