answer: 'Well, you see, that's not so easy to know.'

The daughter was about fifteen and the son a couple of years younger.
About these, too, the public opinion of Aabenraa and district had it
that a worse pair of youngsters had seldom grown up in those parts.

Waldemar was a little, pale, dark-eyed fellow, slippery as an eel, full
of mischief and cunning, with a face of indiarubber, which in one second
could change its expression from the boldest effrontery to the most
sheepish innocence.

Nor was there anything good to say about Thyra, except that she gave
promise of becoming a pretty girl. But all sorts of ugly stories were
already told about her, and she gadded round the town upon very various
errands.

Mam Hansen would never listen to these stories; she merely waved them
off. She paid just as little attention to the advice of her female
friends and neighbours, when they said:

'Let the children shift for themselves--really, they're quite brazen
enough to do it--and take in a couple of paying lodgers.'

'No, no,' Mam Hansen would reply; 'as long as they have some kind of a
home with me, the police will not get a firm grip of them, and they will
not quite flow over.'

This idea, that the bairns should not quite 'flow over,' had grown and
grown in her puny brain, until it had become the last point, around
which gathered everything motherly that could be left, after a life like