Some strangers who were going over the factory came up the room, and stopped and questioned and examined.  And the young workwomen sat each in her place, with head bent over her work, as if she had no thought for anything but her reels.

The morning light shone with a kind of dizzy stillness in from the great windows high up in the wall, over human beings, machinery and bales.

It was nearly twelve.  The last hour always dragged so slowly, and the smell of oil and the heat from the engines seemed to increase and become almost stupifying.

Still a few more long stifling minutes.  At last the bell rang.

And dressed, as if by a stroke of magic, the factory girls swarmed down the steps, with their breakfast-tins in their hands, in their neat aprons, handkerchiefs nicely tied under their chins, and knitted shawls crossed over their chests.

Oh, the bright spring air!—­to take a good breath of it!  Silla, hot and thirsty, knocked off a bit of frozen snow from the fence with her tin and ate it.

With her head full of all that Kristofa had held out to her about the dance at the Letvindt, she wandered down arm-in-arm with a long row of her companions.  The road out from the factory was quite crowded; lower down it widened out, with a street-like pavement.

“Look, look, Kristofa!  Veyergang has come back from England already!” The young girls nudged each other, highly interested.  “New topcoat; light, light brown!”

“Pooh! I saw him come by the steamer yesterday, him and a whole heap of English people.  They were all brown together; I counted exactly seven different kinds of dirt-colour!” It was Josefa who was using her tongue; she had had practice at a milliner’s.

“He’ll have to take care of the oil!” tittered one.

“He’s awfully handsome!  Look what a grand forehead!  Oh, what a lovely red silk handkerchief in his breast-pocket!” whispered Kristofa to Silla.

The row squeezed themselves up against the fence.  The person in question came by humming carelessly, with his head held high and swinging his walking-stick.  All the young girls stared respectfully and stupidly straight in front of them, though not without a glance out of the corner of their eye.  He disappeared up the stream, cleaving it like a salmon.

“He parts his hair at the back of his head!”—­“His hat is like a pudding-basin!”—­“Don’t breathe upon him, he is so thin!”—­“He is his own father’s son!”—­“Oh, what a conceited stick!”

They had turned to look after him.

“He isn’t nearly so stern as he walks there; but in the factory, you know, he has to be as firm as a rock.  Johanna Sjoberg, who does clear starching, recognised him down at the masked ball at the fair; she told me so herself.”

“You can just fancy,” struck in Jakobina, “what a number of fine people come to the rooms in that way.  You think you are only waltzing with a common man, and perhaps it is the son of the richest man in the town!  But if you are a little careful you can easily tell by the way they dance, or by their watch, or their shirt-collar, or because they chew such fine tobacco.”