She was thinking of a tall young man, who carried a very delicate, tiny, blackdressed lady in his arms; she was thinking of a tall man, who steered his small ship in between cliffs and rocks in a devastating gale. She heard a whole conversation over again. She blushed: Eugene Carlson might have thought that you were paying court to him! With a little jealous association of ideas she continued: No one would ever run after Clara in a wood in the rainstorm, she would never have invited a stranger--literally asked him--to sail with her. “Lady to her fingertips,” Carlson had said of Clara; that really was a reprimand for you, you peasant-girl Camilla! Then she undressed with affected slowness, went to bed, took a small elegantly bound book from the bookshelf near by and opened the first page. She read through a short hand-written poem with a tired, bitter expression on her face, then let the book drop to the floor and burst into tears; afterwards she tenderly picked it up again, put it back in its place and blew out the candle; lay there for a little while gazing disconsolately at the moonlit blind, and finally went to sleep.
A few days later the “rainman” started on his way to Cape Trafalgar. He met a peasant driving a load of rye straw, and received permission to ride with him. Then he lay down on his back in the straw and gazed at the cloudless sky. The first couple of miles he let his thoughts come and go as they listed, besides there wasn’t much variety in them. Most of them would come and ask him how a human being possibly could be so wonderfully beautiful, and they marveled that it really could be an entertaining occupation for several days to recall the features of a face, its changes of expression and coloring, the small movements of a head and a pair of hands, and the varying inflections in a voice. But then the peasant pointed with his whip towards the slate-roof about a mile away and said that the councilor lived over there, and the good Mogens rose from the straw and stared anxiously towards the roof. He had a strange feeling of oppression and tried to make himself believe that nobody was at home, but tenaciously came back to the conception that there was a large party, and he could not free himself from that idea, even though he counted how many cows “Country-joy” had on the meadow and how many heaps of gravel he could see along the road. At last the peasant stopped near a small path leading down to the country-house, and Mogens slid down from the cart and began to brush away the bits of straw while the cart slowly creaked away over the gravel on the road.