Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/222

 have the watchman up," she said. "It is already late. Oh dear me, yes! I wish I was in bed!"

She lit a little bit of a candle, which stood on the chest of drawers, and slouched out.

It was the hour at which I usually left, and I seldom stayed later because I knew that Minna had to get up early.

But she asked me to stay, for she said that she would not be able to sleep for several hours.

"I have read to you, now you might tell me tales," she said, and seated herself beside me on the little sofa. "I have told you so much about my own childhood, and have not heard nearly enough of yours. Do tell me."

I told her of the calm lonely life in a Ranger's home in the south of Zeeland. My mother I could hardly remember, but my recently lost father I described with all the grief which overwhelmed me by the thought that he would have come to love my Minna, and that she in him would have found a second father. He was in some ways rather peculiar, an old disciple of Schopenhauer, and a philosopher of nature; in consequence he was always quarrelling with the parsons of the neighbourhood, who had a craze to convert him. I shared his hermit life and, to the disgust of the neighbourhood, he brought me up in his free views.

Minna sang the part from the Valkyrie where Siegmund relates his youth:

"By the way, have you wolves in Denmark?"

"Of course we have, and polar bears go about on skates there."