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You mustn't make a noise come this way," and she showed him into the room at the side. "Where is Gjert?" He looked at her in surprise; this was not her usual way of receiving him. There was a confidence in her tone, as if she had taken upon herself to call him to account for his absence.
"But how has it all happened, Salvé?" "Well, you see, I had taken the idea into my head about Gjert that he should become something a little better than his father had been, and so I went up to the Master, to Beck, and asked what I must do to push the thing. Yes; and I spoke to young Fru Beck too." "Salvé! did you go to Beck?"
He then threw his cap down on the stones with a great sailor air, and with an eager "hale-hoi o ohoi!" began to haul in the shore-rope which his father had thrown, while Gjert, paying no attention whatever to his brother's efforts, made it fast to the mooring-ring. "That's good lads! Stay here now, both of you, by the boat, and look after her till I come back," said their father.
But when, for a moment, she and Gjert were left alone together in the house, drawing him hastily towards her, she whispered, in a voice choked with repressed emotion "Never let your father see that you are afraid, my boy." She bade her husband farewell at the door; and there was foul weather both within and without the pilot as he put to sea that evening.
The intelligence had the effect of bringing his mother to a seat, with the plate on her lap, while she looked apprehensively from her son to her husband. There was nothing, however, in the aspect of the latter to justify her apprehension. "Who did you hear this from, Gjert?" she asked. "Who did I hear it from? From everybody."
A man-of-war had lately come up to Arendal from a cadet cruise to the Mediterranean, and Gjert had been allowed to go over with one of the other pilots to see her.
Gjert would have been frightened under ordinary circumstances, but his anxiety for his mother, for whom his heart bled, gave him courage to answer boldly "Yes, father; I have been wanting all the time to ask how mother was. Is she not coming? Poor mother!" and the boy burst into tears, laid his head upon his arm, and sobbed.
"Wouldn't it be a fine thing, don't you think, to see the boy come home to you some day in a smart uniform, Elizabeth? You have always had a turn for that sort of thing," he added, jokingly. "And since you couldn't go in for it yourself, as they don't take womenfolk in the navy and it was not much in my line either, why, I thought we could make the experiment with Gjert."
Gjert's curiosity about everything connected with the vessel was unbounded, and Frederick Beck, with whom he had established a close friendship since that little affair with the other's grandfather, when Gjert had saved him from punishment, could not tell him half enough. "Fancy," he thought, "to be able to go about in a uniform all covered with gold like the officers there on board!"
When Gjert came in in the morning, he found his father lying down on the bench with all his clothes on. He was asleep. It was evident that he had sat up the whole night. It went to the boy's heart; and he felt sorry for his father now. The latter woke shortly after and looked at him rather confusedly at first. Then he said, gently
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