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Augusta sprang up, and held her hand to her ear. "Some love-lorn mountain-cock playing yonder in the pine copse," suggested Arnfinn, amused at his cousin's eagerness. "You silly boy! Don't you know the mountain-cock never plays except at sunrise?" "He would have a sorry time of it now, then, when there IS no sunrise." "And so he has; he does not play except in early spring."
Some four hours later, Arnfinn woke up with a vague feeling as if some great calamity had happened; he was not sure but that he had slept a fortnight or more. He dressed with a sleepy, reckless haste, being but dimly conscious of the logic of the various processes of ablution which he underwent. He hurried up to Strand's room, but, as he had expected, found it empty.
But then she only read the faster, and David and Agnes were already safe in the haven of matrimony before either she or Arnfinn was aware that they had struggled successfully through the perilous reefs and quicksands of courtship.
And Inga walked on in silence under the sunny birches which grew along the road, trying vainly to picture to herself this strange phenomenon of a man. "I brought his book," remarked Arnfinn, making a gigantic effort to be generous, for he felt dim stirrings of jealousy within him. "If you care to read it, I think it will explain him to you better than anything I could say."
Her latest "aberration," as Arnfinn called it, was an extraordinary interest in the habits of the eider-ducks, auks, and sea-gulls, the noisy monotony of whose existence had, but a few months ago, appeared to her the symbol of all that was vulgar and coarse in human and animal life.
He was a dangerous character, Hans thought, at least judging from his looks, and it was hardly safe for the young miss to be roaming about the fields at night as long as he was in the neighborhood. "Why don't you speak to the pastor, and have him arrested?" said Arnfinn, impatient of Hans's long-winded recital. "No, no, say nothing to father," demanded Augusta, eagerly.
Arnfinn had a painfully distinct recollection of his early hardships in trying to acquire that soft pronunciation of the r which is peculiar to the western fjord districts of Norway, and which he admired so much in his cousins; for the merry-eyed Inga, who was less scrupulous by a good deal than her older sister, Augusta, had from the beginning persisted in interpreting their relation of cousinship as an unbounded privilege on her part to ridicule him for his personal peculiarities, and especially for his harsh r and his broad eastern accent.
"That is what I call scientific love-making," said Arnfinn, looking up from the book with an expression of subdued amusement. "But Arnfinn," cried the girl, while the laughter quickly died out of her face, "does Mr. Strand know that you are reading this?" "To be sure he does. And that is just what to my mind makes the situation so excessively comical.
Now, the Polar Sea, and many other things, far nearer and dearer, had been forced into uneasy forgetfulness; and Arnfinn was once more with her, no longer a child, and no longer appealing to her for aid and sympathy; man enough, apparently, to have outgrown his boyish needs and still boy enough to be ashamed of having ever had them. It was the third Sunday after Arnfinn's return.
"And so he will, perhaps," rejoined the girl, the mixture of gayety and grave solicitude making her face, as her cousin thought, particularly charming. "Only not a physiological, but possibly a psychological one," remarked Arnfinn. "But listen to this. Here is something rich: "August 9 Miss Augusta once said something about the possibility of animals being immortal.
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