At the window on the ground floor just above the entrance to the cellar, stood a slender, dark-eyed young girl with turned-up sleeves, busy at the water tap under which she had a wash-tub full of clothes.  Her head could be seen now above, now below the short blind, cooled and refreshed by the cold rush of water.

Suddenly she stopped in surprise.

Nikolai entered with his flat cap pushed triumphantly on one side.

“The world’s right enough, I can tell you, Silla.  The only thing is to see that everything is properly in order from the very beginning.  He who hasn’t got a father, must be his own father, you know!”

“But Nikolai!  Did you know mother was out?”

“Pooh!  What is there that I don’t know!  My mother told me just now that it was one of the washing days at Antonisens.  But you see, Silla, it’s beginning to get late, and—­if you’d like to know—­I’ve been invited to-day to be foreman at Mrs. Ellingsen’s.  That’ll be only ten dollars a month more!”

“Foreman?  Is it true, Nikolai?” She retreated from the wash-tub, looking doubtfully at him.  “Come here with your smutty face!” she said, hastily pulling the clothes out of the tub.  “You are so awfully black!  Foreman, did you say?  No, is it really true?  Oh, you must put up with a little splashing; I can’t see the foreman for coal-soot!  Then Mrs. Ellingsen didn’t ask Olaves first?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“And no one put out their tongue or made Mrs. Ellingsen afraid of you, as they did before?”

“Oh, Haegberg must have let her know that he hadn’t taken any harm from me.”

“If only they don’t begin again and do what they can.  For your getting in front of them stings and chafes and torments every one of them, ever since that time when you had to do those wheel pivots over again for Olaves.  And then they dig up all the old stories they can find.”

“Oh no!  The world’s right enough, I tell you, and Mrs. Ellingsen must take the smith who works her smithy best.  Besides it’s as fixed as a vice, and the contract signed this morning.  And it’s pretty badly needed, for the money that mother borrowed last, it—­it—­whu!”—­he whistled—­“has gone the same way as the rest.  It disappears like smoke with her.  It seems to me she trades backwards instead of forwards, and that the profits go the wrong way.”

“Now you’re so nice and clean, that you shine.  That way with your hair or else the cock’s-comb will stand up too much.”

“I rushed straight out of the smithy, you see, to come up here and cram it into you.  I went in to mother first, and then I promised her to go down and buy some mackerel for supper.  Two smacks have come in to-day, they say.”

Silla’s face showed that this was a great piece of news.  They were both natives of the town, and the arrival of the mackerel brought with it a number of pleasant recollections and pictures from the time when they lived in the square down by the wharves.