Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/221

 not first been approved by Else, because he had no particular faith in his own powers of judgment.

Now he stood there with his curious dead-looking eyes, with the bluish-white pupils, staring irresolutely backwards and forwards from mother to daughter. When neither of them said anything, he at last let fall:

"Well, but—well—however in all the world has this here come about, Hansine?"

"I don't know," Hansine answered at last half-angry.

She still rested her head on her arm, but she had left off crying. The combined lamentations of her parents began to wound her.

But now her mother went up to her, and cautiously laying her hand on her shoulder, said: "Well, but tell me, Hansine, d'ye care for him too?"

At first she did not answer, but when her mother repeated the question, at the same time letting her hand rest caressingly—as it were, forgivingly—on her head, she muttered:

"I suppose I do."

"Because that's the root o' the matter, my child, that you both think it'll be for your happiness. For although it's very hard for anyone else to understand, yet—now it's come to this—there's nothing more to be said than to pray that the Lord may send a blessing."

"Send a blessing," echoed her father eagerly, his face lighting up with a smile.