It was this that Barbara, going feverishly in and out, with her best bonnet still loosely tied upon her head, was explaining to Nikolai, who was sitting in the kitchen.

Nikolai’s face did not look as if he saw any help for it.  On the contrary, he sat bending forward with compressed lips, looking down at the floor and twirling his thumbs.  His hair as well as the position of his shoulders and his whole expression looked combative.

Barbara sat down by the cooking-stove; she drew a heavy breath, and sighed out of an oppressed breast.

It would come to an execution as sure as she lived—­and it was for thirty-eight dollars!

Nikolai knew well what she was coming to, and that she was only waiting for him to give her a word that she could hang on to; but this money that he had scraped together was held much faster.  He knew what he wanted, and this trade was only going farther and farther backwards, in any case.

Barbara groaned.  She might as well go into the black ground at once.

Nikolai only snapped his fingers and looked down, doubly decided, at the crack in the floor.

When the pause had become unbearable any longer, and she saw clearly that no answer was coming, she began to cry softly.

She had thought, she sobbed, that when she had a son who was a smith’s foreman, she would not stand quite helpless in the world.

“You know, mother, how badly I am in want of money myself.”

Again an obstinate silence, with continued sobbing and drying of eyes on Barbara’s side.

“It might be as well to consider whether the shop really paid?” suggested Nikolai at last cautiously.

“Would he like her to give up like a cow to be slaughtered before Christmas,” she exclaimed angrily—­“and no more money than that was!”

“I only meant it would be better to stop in time.”

But these words had the effect of fire on gunpowder.  She got up, as red as a tile.  Just so!  Now he wanted her to close!

She rushed—­in a manner somewhat recalling the useful animal just mentioned by herself, when it is trying to get loose—­into the shop and back again.

If Nikolai thought that she would give up and go bankrupt to be jeered at by everybody, when she only needed to go down and borrow that little of Ludvig, he was very much mistaken.

Barbara was quite flushed.

She would not let herself be ruined a second time for Nikolai’s sake.  It was quite enough that he had injured her welfare once before in this world.  Yes, he need not sit and look at her with open mouth.  What else was she turned out of the Veyergangs’ house for, where she had been so important, if it was not because Nikolai had lifted his hand against the Consul-General’s Ludvig.  Oh yes, he might wonder as much as he liked, but that was why she had been driven out helpless into the world, from comfortable circumstances.  And then when an opportunity came for Nikolai to support her a little, he had some one else to spend his money upon.