But you'd better take care, Nikolai!" She began to cry bitterly in impotent rage.
"Oh, well, cry away! I won't say anything.

You've got some one else to comfort you for a little while," he added moodily.
She suddenly sprang up, went up to him, and laid her arm confidingly on his shoulder.
"Don't you _know_ that I'll be your wife, Nikolai ?" she said, looking full and ardently into his eyes; there were still tears on her dark, freckled face.
"Well, if you will, Silla, you shall see who can work." "But mother, Nikolai! Oh, I'm so frightened--so frightened only that she'll get to know that we sometimes meet.

She looks at me so hard every time I've been an errand, and I've always been gone so long.

But when I sit darning and patching of an evening, I sometimes imagine that you come in so fine and rich, and that you own the whole of Haegberg's smithy, so that mother has to give in." "No, do you think about that, Silla?
Then I will come.

She'll have to give in like smoke, if I come only with my credentials, and my honest trade as well." What was it that had happened that light, hazy, summer evening, when the waterfall thundered out beneath the bridge, when the trees seemed to swell with new budding leaves, and the sun glittered on the windows here and there?
Was he intoxicated, or was it the evening that had taken an extra Midsummer carouse?
The last he saw of Silla was that she hurried homewards with her can, and that she had looked round at him, as she turned into the road among the houses.
The world was right enough after all.