The well was finished, the trench¹ was dug, and the man had come to lay the pipes. He chose Grindhusen to help him with the work, and I was set to cutting a way for the pipes up from the cellar through the two floors of the house.

Fruen came down one day when I was busy in the cellar. I called out to her to mind the hole in the floor; but she took it very calmly.

“There’s no hole there now, is there?” she asked, pointing one way. “Or there?” But at last she missed her footing after all, and slipped down into the hole where I was. And there we stood. It was not light there anyway; and for her, coming straight in from the daylight outside, it must have seemed quite dark. She felt about the edge, and said:

“Now, how am I to get up again?”

I lifted her up. It was no matter to speak of; she was slight of figure, for all she had a big girl of her own.

“Well, I must say. . . . ” She stood shaking the earth from her dress. “One, two, three, and up! — as neatly² 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.

“And where are you going then?”

“To the farm just by. Grindhusen’s fixed³ 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. Fr?ken⁴ 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 Providence⁵, 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?

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