She would be really waiting now.
Silla began to cry.
Nikolai had only asked her once or twice to be quiet, and he would find the money.

Now he suddenly said: "I should like to give you another good feed of cakes to-day, and then throw myself into the sea with you, Silla.

It would be no lie that we lay there." Whether his proposition was meant seriously or not, it did not gain a hearing with her.

She sat hopeless and despairing on a log while the big tears ran down her cheeks.
The seventeen-year-old workshop apprentice stood thoughtfully, with his flat cap pushed back over his rough hair, blackened by the week's work.
He was gazing intently into an old rotten hole in the log.

The hole became more and more rotten, more and more hollow, more and more empty while his busy thoughts were trying to find an expedient.