Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/52

 But she could not get over her joyous surprise, or tear herself away from her observation of him. Only when her husband anxiously pulled her skirt once or twice, from behind, did she answer the curate's enquiries.

"Oh, thank ye," she said, in a changed voice, looking towards the door, which she had left ajar behind her: "The Lord be thanked! There's a change for the better, but in the middle of the day she was cruel bad, an when the weather mended, we thought it as well to send a message to the Provst; may be we'd better have left it alone, now the danger's over, an it's no treat for the priest to come out o' nights with such bad roads."

"Oh don't think about that," the curate interrupted her; "there is nothing to be said on that account. You must send for me whenever you want me, I shall always be at your service. Don't you think, if all is ready in the patient's room, that we had better go in?"

The woman carefully opened the door of the side room, and all three stepped quietly down into an oblong, dimly lighted room, a step lower than the living room. A little table with a shaded lamp, a medicine bottle, and a prayerbook, stood at the head of a broad bed which took up the narrow wall. In the bed lay a brown-haired girl, with heavy, closed eyelids, and a dark fever flush on her cheek.

The young priest turned round hastily, and said in bewilderment: