"Certainly, on account of the top story----"
"It's annoying! And what does your mother say?"
"Hm--she says we must wait another year, that it isn't respectable to get married in such a hurry--it's just as if----"
"Yes, four years. Louw and Anna have been engaged for seven."
Walter was proud that he knew exactly what it all meant. To rent an upper story together, preferably in May!--that was the way he understood it.
"And do you get that press for the linen?"
"No, mother wants to keep it. But if we will only wait a year she will give us another one--a small one."
"I think so too, but she says young people don't need a big press. But when my sister was married she got a big one."
"Try it. I won't marry without that big one."
This is a fair sample of what Walter overheard. He was dissatisfied and slipped away and hid himself, lost in thought. He didn't even know himself what was the matter with him; but when Emma came and called him he looked as if he had been thinking of anything else but presses and vacant flats, for in a tone at once joyous and fearful he cried:
It was evening now, and the children were to continue their games indoors. As the little party was tired, one of the grown-ups was going to tell a story.
Just what "grown-up" had been requisitioned to narrate the story of Paradise and Peri, I don't know. Anyway the story hardly harmonized with Betty's engagement and that love-obstructing clothes-press. But just as Fortune is said to smile on everyone once in a lifetime, so, in the midst of the flatness and insipidity of everyday life, it seems that something always happens which gives that one who lays hold of it opportunity to lift himself above the ordinary and commonplace. To the drowning man a voice calls: "Stretch out thy arms, thou canst swim."
"After Peri had begged long, but in vain, at the gates of paradise to be admitted to the land of the blessed, she brought at last, as the most beautiful thing in the world, the sigh of a repentant sinner; and she found favor with the keeper of the gate on account of the sacredness of the gift she had brought----"
"Let's play forfeits now!" cried Gustave.
"Forfeits! Forfeits!" everybody called out after him.
And they played forfeits. Pawns were redeemed; and of course there was some kissing done. Riddles were given that nobody could guess; and who ever knew must not tell--a usual condition in this game.