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There was Augusta, the elder, who was what Arnfinn called "indiscriminately reformatory," and had a universal desire to improve everything, from the Government down to agricultural implements and preserve jars.
"Yes, you are wonderfully discreet," cried Arnfinn, laughing, while the girl bit her under lip with an air of penitence and mortification which, in any other bosom than a cousin's would have aroused compassion. "Aha!
His uncle was charitable enough to check his own curiosity about the nephew's progress in the arts and sciences, and the result of his recent examinations, till he should have become fairly settled under his roof; and Arnfinn, who, in spite of his natural brightness and ready humor, was anything but a "dig," was grateful for the respite.
Her eyes shone with a beautiful animation as she spoke. I am longing to continue the subject with her. It haunts me the whole day long. There may be more in the idea than appears to a superficial observer." "Oh, how charmingly he understands how to deceive himself," cried Inga. "Merely a quid pro quo," said Arnfinn. "I know what I shall do!" "And so do I." "Won't you tell me, please?" "No."
"Cousin Inga," said Arnfinn, and this time with as near an approach to earnestness as he was capable of at that moment, "I do believe that Strand is in love with Augusta." Inga dropped the book, and sent him what was meant to be a glance of severe rebuke, and then said, in her own amusingly emphatic way: "I do wish you wouldn't joke with such things, Arnfinn." "Joke! Indeed I am not joking.
Her ridicule was always very good-natured, to be sure, but therefore no less annoying. But such is the perverseness of human nature in spite of a series of apparent rebuffs, interrupted now and then by fits of violent attachment, Arnfinn had early selected this dimpled and yellow-haired young girl, with her piquant little nose, for his favorite cousin.
"To tell the truth, Vording," he said, in a deep, full-ringing bass, "I didn't know that these were your cousin's barns I mean that your uncle" giving the unhappy hand an emphatic shake "inhabited these barns." "No, thank heaven, we are not quite reduced to that," cried Arnfinn, gayly; "we still boast a parsonage, as you will presently discover, and a very bright and cozy one, to boot.
"You are getting quite dithyrambic, my dear," remarked Arnfinn, with an air of cousinly superiority, which he felt was eminently becoming to him; and Augusta looked up with quick surprise, then smiled in an absent way, and forgot what she had been saying. She had no suspicion but that her enthusiasm had been all for the sunset.
He had once detected her, when a child, standing before a mirror, and pinching this unhappy feature in the middle, in the hope of making it "like Augusta's;" and since then he had no longer felt so utterly defenseless whenever his own foibles were attacked. "But what of your friend, Arnfinn?" exclaimed Inga, as she ran up the stairs of the pier. "He of whom you have written so much.
Strand stood looking after her, quite unmindful of his feathered patient, which flew chirping about him in the grass. Two hours later Arnfinn found him sitting under the birches with his hands clasped over the top of his head, and his surgical instruments scattered on the ground around him.
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