While she was looking out some of her old shawls and skirts to put under him, taking some of the clothes from her own bed, and making it as comfortable and warm as she could for him on the bench, Nikolai seemed to have forgotten all his troubles.

There was so much that was new up here.  There were such a number of shining tin things hanging all over the wall, and then the cat was an old friend.  He had seen it many a time down in the yard, and now he had to squeeze himself together to get hold of it, it had crept so far under the bed.

There!  He had knocked down the tin kettle with his back!

He fled in terror to the door.  But Maren picked it up quite quietly; there was not a word of scolding, a thing he wondered more at than either the tin things or the cat.

Maren had at last fallen asleep after all the aching and pain of the rheumatism in her weary joints, with which she always had to contend at the beginning of the night.  She was awakened by a wild shriek.

“What is it—­what is it, Nikolai?  Nikolai!”

She lighted the bit of candle.  He was sitting up, fencing with his arms.

“I thought they were going to take my head off,” he explained, when he at length collected himself.

When she lay down again, Maren could not help thinking how glad she was that she had no child to be responsible for.  Every one has his trouble, and now she had this rheumatism.

But it was a shock to her, when, on the kitchen stairs next morning, in the presence of the servants both from the other side of the passage and from the first floor, Mrs. Holman called her to account for having interfered in what was none of her business.  She then received such full information, once for all, both as to why Mrs. Holman had shut him in, and what they had to go through daily with that boy, that Maren was completely nonplussed.  For this Mrs. Holman could stake her life upon, that if there was any one in the house who could not stand disorder or unseemly behaviour, it was she.  She could not imagine a worse punishment than to have it said of her that she allowed shame and depravity to flourish in her sight.

But when Maren sat down there in the evening by the lantern on the chopping-block, and could hear the boy screaming right from the Holmans’ room, she was not capable of going upstairs until the worst was over.  She thought she had never heard anything so heart-rending, even though it was in the cause of justice.

Up with Maren was a kind of harbour of refuge for the boy.  He would sit there as quiet as a mouse in the corner by the wood-box, carving himself boats, which he put under his blouse when he carried Holman’s dinner down to the workshop near the quay.

To represent, however, that Nikolai’s existence was passed, so to speak, in the coal-cellar, or under blows on back and ear from Mrs. Holman’s warm hands, would be an exaggeration.  He had also his palmy days, when Mrs. Holman overflowed with words of praise—­praise, if not exactly of him, yet of everything that she had accomplished in her daily toil for his moral improvement.