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When their hunger was satisfied the witticisms began to fly. Morten's present was a great wedding-cake. It was a real work of art; he had made it in the form of a pyramid. On the summit stood a youthful couple, made of sugar, who held one another embraced, while behind them was a highly glazed representation of the rising sun.
After the funeral he and Pelle walked home together while the others drove. Pelle talked of indifferent matters in order to draw Morten's thoughts away from the child, but Morten did not listen to him. "My dear fellow, you can't go on like this," said Pelle suddenly, putting his arm through Morten's.
The step came upstairs, and as it passed her door she heard Morten's voice say, "I am sure you never thought that I should come out this evening;" and Fanny's answer, "Oh, one feels that sort of thing instinctively!" Madeleine breathed again. It was indeed Fanny's voice, in its most insinuating and deceitful tones.
The Amager farmers fatten their swine there, and the sanitary commission talks about forbidding it; but no one has compassion on the Copenhagen poor." Pelle shuddered. There was something demoniacal in Morten's hideous knowledge he knew more of the "Ark" than Pelle himself. "Have you, too, been down in that loathsome rubbish-store?" he asked, "or how do you know all this?"
It isn't much of a pension, but enough for her. She has her mother at home. Getting there is the difficulty. And and you see, not being a soldier's wife 'We'll arrange the passage home, of course, said Tallantire quietly. 'It's not nice to think of sending round the hat; but, good Lord! how many men I lie here and remember that had to do it! Morten's dead he was of my year.
That's how only the very poorest people think those who haven't any feelings of shame!" Pelle blushed for his vulgar way of looking at things. "It's no fault of Morten's that his father's like that!" he retorted lamely. "No, we won't have Morten here. And mother won't let us. She says perhaps we can play with you, but not with anybody else.
In Morten's sitting-room, a hunched-up figure was sitting with its back to the window, staring down at the floor. His clothes hung loosely upon him, and his thin hair was colorless. He slowly raised a wasted face as he looked toward the door. Pelle had already recognized him from his maimed right hand, which had only the thumb and one joint of the forefinger.
While they sat talking, a sound came now and then from the other room, and each time a nervous look came into Morten's face, and he glanced in annoyance at the closed door. Gradually he became quite restless and his attention was fixed on these sounds. Pelle wondered at it, but asked no questions. Suddenly there came the sound of a chair being overturned.
Ellen was still his very life, however violently he might deny it. Her questioning eyes still gazed at him enigmatically, from whatever corner of existence he might approach. He had a strong feeling now that she had held herself ready all this time that she had sat waiting for him, expecting him. How would she accept this? From Castle Street he saw a light in Morten's room.
"I must have that with me, whatever else is left out," he said with determination. It was Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," Morten's Bible. Ellen opened it at the title-page to see if it really was so necessary to travel about with such a monster; it was as big as a loaf.
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