Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/106

 would be shy, but gradually become lively and frank, and would end by singing Bellman's Songs in the garden by moonlight; how at last one of them,—not the merry and amusing one, but the one with the deep dark eyes—would, on taking leave, press her hand and stammer some agitated words about not forgetting him, and how in the following year he would come back, having taken his degree, and ask her father for her hand with earnest words.

But no tourists ever came to that desolate corner of the country, and summer after summer went by without the smallest sign of a romantic episode. Ragnhild Tönnesen used to smile when she looked back at her youthful dreams. She had often been troubled later by suitors among the beer-fattened Squire's sons, who evidently were quite unable to grasp that she—especially now that she was no longer in her first youth—did not gratefully accept their offers. But otherwise the years she had passed at her father's side had slipped by without any experiences of interest whatever. Now and then, when she looked back at her life, she could hardly believe that she was not more than four and twenty, and still in the height of her bloom. She felt certain that she must have begun to grow old. In short, there was nothing in the world which realized her anticipations except