They were all three silent awhile, she hummed again, and looked round. Ovind went away and sat by himself.
"We don't need to take from the school fund," said she, when the lad was gone.
Her husband looked at her: "Poor people like us!"
"I don't like, Thore, that you should always give yourself out for poor when you are not so."
They both of them peeped to see whether the lad could hear them where he sat.
Then the father looked sharply at her. "Nonsense! you don't understand things."
She laughed, then said seriously, "It seems like not thanking God that we have got on well."
"He can be thanked without wearing silver buttons," observed the father.
"Yes, but to let Ovind go as he went yesterday to the dance is not to thank Him."
"Yet he may dress decently when we can afford it."
"He can't hear, or else I should have a good mind to do it," she said, looking naively at her husband, as he glumly put his spoon away and took out his pipe.
"I can't help laughing at you, you always talk of the farm and never speak of the mills!"
"Oh dear! you and the mills; I don't think you care whether they go or not."
"Yes, thank God, if they'd only go both night and day."
"But now they've been standing ever since before Christmas."
"They grind when there's water; but since they got the mill up at Nystrommen, there's nothing to be done."
"H'm-- I shall let a more discreet man than the schoolmaster manage our affairs."
"Yes, last of all he should talk with your own wife."
Thore did not reply to this, but lighting his pipe, he rose and leaned against the wood pile, looking first at his wife and then at his son, and finally fixing his gaze on an old crow's nest that hung deserted up in a pine tree.
Ovind sat by himself, with the future spread before him, like a long blank sheet of ice, along which, for the first time, he rushed restlessly from one side to the other. He saw clearly that poverty hemmed him in on every side, but this made him only the more determined to overcome it. From Marit it had certainly separated him for ever; he half regarded her as engaged to Jon Hatlen; but he resolved that with all his might he would strive to keep pace with them through life. Not to be any more humiliated as he had been yesterday, he would keep away, till, by God's help, he could become something more than he was at present, and he did not feel a doubt in his own mind but that he should succeed. He had a sort of feeling that he would do best to study, but what further that should lead to he must leave to the future.