A curious piece of news awaited me: Falkenberg had taken service with the Captain as a farm-hand.

This upset the plan we had agreed on, and left me alone once more. I could not understand a word of it all. Anyhow, I could think it over tomorrow. . . . By two in the morning I was still lying awake, shivering and thinking. All those hours I could not get warm; then at last it turned hot, and I lay there in full fever. . . . How frightened she had been yesterday — dared not sit down to eat with me by the roadside, and never opened her eyes to me once through all the journey. . . .

Coming to my senses for a moment, it occurs to me I might wake Falkenberg with my tossing about, and perhaps say things in my delirium¹. That would never do. I clench² my teeth and jump up, get into my clothes again, scramble³ down the stairs, and set out over the fields at a run. After a little my clothes begin to warm me; I make towards the woods, towards the spot where we had been working; sweat and rain pour down my face. If only I can find the saw and work the fever out of my body —’tis an old and tried cure of mine, that. The saw is nowhere to be seen, but I come upon the ax I had left there Saturday evening, and set to work with that. It is almost too dark to see at all, but I feel at the cut now and then with my hands, and bring down several trees. The sweat pours off me now.

Then, feeling exhausted⁴ enough, I hide the ax in its old place; it is getting light now, and I set off at a run for home.

“Where have you been?” asks Falkenberg.

Now, I do not want him to know about my having taken cold the day before, and perhaps go making talk of it in the kitchen; I simply mutter something about not knowing quite where I have been.

“You’ve been up to see R?nnaug, I bet,” he said.

I answered: yes, I had been with R?nnaug, since he’d guessed it.

“’Twas none so hard to guess,” he said. “Anyhow, you won’t see me running after any of them now.”

“Going to have Emma, then?”

“Why, it looks that way. It’s a pity you can’t get taken on here, too. Then you might get one of the others, perhaps.”

And he went on talking of how I might perhaps have got my pick of the other girls, but the Captain had no use for me. I wasn’t even to go out tomorrow to the wood. . . . The words sound far away, reaching me across a sea of sleep that is rolling towards me.

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