Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/321

stretched drearily, a great, sad, mysterious blank on either side of them, and when they reached Helga station it was quite dark, and they had been speechless for more than half an hour.

Hjorth had sent her back; that was all Johanna's numbed mind could comprehend.

Johanna and her aunt separated at the station. Frue Berg set off at a great pace for the farm, but Johanna turned in just the opposite direction. Frue Berg was tired, anxious, and very cross. Foreshadowing, of distress and discomfort as a result of the afternoon's escapade haunted her. She vaguely wondered in what form her niece's and her own action would be punished, and settled in her mind that there should be good excuses coined for their visit to Vik, which Herr Berg would accept without any doubt. Johanna, she determined, should be made to understand that her foolishness in telling Hjorth she was betrothed must not be repeated by making a clean breast of matters to Ormond. "If I'd understood the girl," grumbled the farmer's wife to herself, "she should have gone down on her bended knees before I'd have taken her to Vik."

As she tramped sullenly along the sandy road leading from the station, head downwards, walking in growing wrath mingled largely with resentment, with a thought for the baking she had left behind, and the teasing side conviction that the fact that she had done so unhousewifely an action would materially interfere with the appearance of truth her tale would bear, Frue Berg heard a sudden chorus of shouts.

"It's something to do with Lauritz," she cried out, quite loud; and with the mother-wit of a woman there flashed into her minda prescience