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at noon.”
    No more was said about that. For a while neither of them spoke. Sara stuck her head through the door to announce that supper was being served. A moment later Nagel said, “And now Miss Kielland is engaged. What does her fiancé look like?”
    “He’s Lieutenant Hansen, a fine and truly excellent man. Well, she won’t suffer any deprivation with him.”
    “Is he wealthy?”
    “Yes, his father is extremely wealthy.”
    “Is he a businessman?”
    “No, he’s a shipowner. He lives a couple of doors from here. By the way, his house is not very big, but he doesn’t really need a bigger one; when the son is away there is only the old couple there. They also have a daughter, but she’s married in England.”
    “And how much do you think old Hansen is good for?”
    “He may be good for a million. Nobody knows.”
    Pause.
    “Ah yes,” Nagel goes on to say, “things are badly distributed in this world. What if you, say, had a little of that money, Grøgaard?”
    “God bless you, no, why should I? We must be satisfied with what we have.” 9
    “That’s what they say.... Oh, I just thought of something I wanted to ask you: You don’t have very much time for other work, do you, since you must carry all that coal around? That’s quite obvious. But didn’t I hear you ask the hotel keeper whether he had something more for you to do today?”
    “No,” Miniman replies, shaking his head.
    “It was down in the café. You told him you’d brought the coal into the kitchen, and then you said, ‘I suppose that will be all for today?’ ”
    “That was because of something else. So you noticed that, did you? No, the fact of the matter is that I hoped to be paid for the coal right away, but I didn’t dare ask him directly. 10 That’s all. We are in financial difficulty right now and had hopes of getting this payment.”
    “How much would you need to get out of your difficulty?” Nagel asks.
    “God forbid!” Miniman cries in a loud voice. “Don’t mention it again, we’ve been more than amply helped out already. It was all a matter of six kroner, and here I sit with your twenty kroner in my pocket, may God reward you for it! True, we did owe those six kroner, to our grocer, for potatoes and some other things. He had sent us a bill, and we were both trying to figure out what to do about it. But now we’re no longer in need, we can sleep without a care in the world as far as that goes and face tomorrow quite contented.”
    Pause.
    “Well, perhaps we’d better drink up and say goodbye for now,” Nagel says, getting up. “Skoal! I do hope this won’t be the last time we see each other. In fact, you must promise to come again; I’m in Number 7, as you can see. Thanks, thanks for a nice evening!”
    Nagel said this quite sincerely as he shook Miniman’s hand. He saw his visitor downstairs and walked him to the front door, where he bowed deeply, doffing his velvet cap as once before.
    Miniman left. He bowed ever so many times as he walked backward up the street. But he couldn’t utter a word, though he kept trying to say something.
    When Nagel entered the dining room he made an unduly polite apology to Sara for being late for supper.

IV
    JOHAN NAGEL WAS AWAKENED in the morning by Sara knocking on his door to bring him his newspapers. He browsed through them, tossing them on the floor as he finished with them. A dispatch to the effect that Gladstone had been in bed with a cold for two days but was now on his feet again, he read through twice, followed by bursts of laughter. Then he crossed his arms behind his head and lapsed into the following train of thought, all the while talking aloud to himself from time to time:
    It’s dangerous to walk in the woods with an open penknife in your hand. How easily one may stumble so awkwardly that the blade slashes not only one but two wrists. Just look what happened to Karlsen.... 1 Come to that, it’s also dangerous to walk around with a medicine vial in your