"You're lucky, being able to sing like that," I said. "But there's neither
of us'll get her, for all that."

"Get her! Why, whoever thought.... What a fool you are!"

"Ah, if I were young and rich and handsome, I'd win her all the same," I
said.

"If--and if.... So could I, for the matter of that. But there's the
Captain."

"Yes, and then there's you. And then there's me. And then there's herself
and everybody else in the world. And we're a couple of brutes to be
talking about her like this at all," said I, furious now with myself for
my own part. "A nice thing, indeed, for two old woodcutters to speak of
their mistress so."

We grew pale and thin the pair of us, and the wrinkles showed up in
Falkenberg's drawn face; neither of us could eat as we used. And by way of
trying to hide our troubles from each other, I went about talking all
sorts of cheerful nonsense, while Falkenberg bragged loudly at every meal
of how he'd got to eating too much of late, and was getting slack and out
of form.

"Why, you don't seem to eat anything at all," Fruen would say when we came
home with too much left of the food we had taken with us. "Nice
woodcutters, indeed."

"It's Falkenberg that won't eat," said I.