and I took care myself they should not, but kept out of the way. I was
still ashamed of the recollection. But then, at last, in the middle of the
week, one of the maids came with a message that I was not to go running
off into the woods every Sunday afternoon, but come to coffee with the
rest. Fruen herself had said so.

Good!

Now, should I put on my best clothes or not? No harm, perhaps, in letting
that young lady get into her head that I was one who had chosen to turn my
back upon the life of cities, and taken upon myself the guise of a
servant, for all I was a man of parts, that could lay on water to a house.
But when I had dressed, I felt myself that my working clothes were better
suited to me now; I took off my best things again, and hid them carefully
in my bag.

But, as it happened, it was not Frokenen at all who received me on that
Sunday afternoon, but Fruen. She talked to me for quite a while, and she
had spread a little white cloth under my cup.

"That trick of yours with the egg is likely to cost us something before
we've done with it," said Fruen, with a kindly laugh. "The boy's used up
half a dozen eggs already."

I had taught Harald the trick of passing a hard boiled egg with the shell
off through the neck of a decanter, by thinning the air inside. It was
about the only experiment in physics that I knew.

"But that one with breaking the stick in the two paper loops was really
interesting," Fruen went on. "I don't understand that sort of thing