After these achievements the wind plunged down into the heather, ran along the deep ditches, and took a substantial grip of the mail-coach, which it met half a mile from the town.

‘He is always in a devil of a hurry to get to Krarup Kro!’ growled Anders, the postboy, cracking his whip over the perspiring horses.

For this was certainly the twentieth time that the guard had lowered the window to shout something or other up to Anders.  First it was a friendly invitation to a coffee-punch in the inn; but each time the friendliness became scantier, until at last the window was let down with a bang, and out sped some brief but expressive remarks about both driver and horses, which Anders, at all events, could not have cared to hear.

Meanwhile the wind swept low along the ground, and sighed long and strangely in the dry clusters of heather.  The moon was full, but so densely beclouded that only a pale hazy shimmer hovered over the night.

Behind Krarup Kro lay a peat moss, dark with black turf-stacks and dangerous deep pits.  And among the heathery mounds there wound a strip of grass that looked like a path; but it was no path, for it stopped on the very brink of a turf-pit that was larger than the others, and deeper also.

In this grassy strip the fox lay and lurked, quite flat, and the hare bounded lightly over the heather.

It was easy for the fox to calculate that the hare would not describe a wide circle so late in the evening.  It cautiously raised its pointed nose and made an estimate; and as it sneaked back before the wind, to find a good place from which it could see where the hare would finish its circuit and lie down, it self-complacently thought that the foxes were always getting wiser and wiser, and the hares more foolish than ever.

In the inn they were unusually busy, for a couple of commercial travellers had ordered roast hare; besides, the landlord was at an auction in Thisted, and Madame had never been in the habit of seeing to anything but the kitchen.  But now it unfortunately chanced that the lawyer wanted to get hold of the landlord, and, as he was not at home, Madame had to receive a lengthy message and an extremely important letter, which utterly bewildered her.

By the stove stood a strange man in oilskins, waiting for a bottle of soda-water; two fish-buyers had three times demanded cognac for their coffee; the stableman stood with an empty lantern waiting for a light, and a tall, hard-featured countryman followed Karen anxiously with his eyes; he had to get sixty-three oere change out of a krone. [Footnote:  A krone contains 100 oere, and is equal to 1 S. 1-1/2 d.]

But Karen went to and fro without hurrying herself, and without getting confused.  One could scarcely understand how she kept account of all this.  The large eyes and the wondering eyebrows were strained as if in expectation.  She held her fine little head erect and steady, as if not to be distracted from all she had to think of.  Her simple dress of blue serge had become too tight for her, so that the collar cut slightly into her neck, forming a little fold in the skin below the hair.