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Something like an estate! "What's the name of that place?" cried Peer, gazing at it. "Loreng." "And who owns it?" "Don't know," answered the girl, cracking her whip. Next moment the horse turned in to the avenue, and Peer caught involuntarily at the reins. "Hei! Brownie where are you going?" he cried. "Why not go up and have a look?" said Merle.
Ah! here was the big carriage from Loreng, with the two strangers and Peer himself, who had been down to fetch them from the hotel. He was a little pale as he took the reins and climbed to his seat on the machine, to drive it himself through the meadow of high, thick timothy-grass.
A little shaggy, grey-bearded old man stood chopping and sawing in the wood-shed at Loreng. He had been there longer than anyone could remember. One master left, another took his place what was that to the little man? Didn't the one need firewood and didn't the other need firewood just the same?
Late that evening Peer sat at the hotel with a note-book, working the thing out. He had bought Loreng; his father-in-law had been reasonable, and had let him have the place, lands and woods and all, for the ridiculous price he had paid himself. There was a mortgage of thirty thousand crowns on the estate.
"There he is again," said Laura. "Sh! don't laugh so loud. There! now he's stopping again!" "He's whistling to a bird," said Oliana. "Or talking to himself perhaps. Do you think he's quite right in his head?" "Sh! The mistress'll hear." It was no less a person than the master of Loreng himself whose proceedings struck them as so comic.
But but I'm not worth as much as that altogether." "I can put in three hundred thousand of the four myself, in shares. And then, of course, I have the Loreng property, and the works. But put it at a round figure will you guarantee a hundred thousand?" There was another pause, and then the reply came from the far end of the room to which Uthoug had drifted: "Even that's a big sum."
Well, that might stand as it was, for the bulk of Peer's money was tied up in Ferdinand Holm's company. A few days after he carried Merle off to the capital, leaving the carpenters and painters hard at work at Loreng. One day he was sitting alone at the hotel in Christiania Merle was out shopping when there was a very discreet knock at the door. "Come in," called Peer.
Peer would spring up, believing for a moment that someone was really there. But there was nothing, only the empty air. Now and again he would go home to Loreng, but everything there seemed to pass in a mist. He could see that Merle's eyes were red, though she sang cheerily as she went about the house. It seemed to him that she had begged him to go to bed and rest, and he had gone to bed.
They had a cow now, and a pig and some fowls. It was not exactly on the same scale as at Loreng, but it had the advantage that he could manage it all himself. Last year they had raised so many potatoes that they had been able to sell a few bushels. They did not buy eggs any more they sold them.
Where the road left the wood most of them stopped for a moment to look up at Loreng. The great white house seemed to have set itself high on its hill to look out far and wide over the lake and the country round.
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