was saying, though, the other day, that if I were to be a cadet
I should cut a better figure in the world than as an ordinary common
sailor."

It was as if a match had been thrown into a gunpowder-magazine. His
father's hard face flushed up wildly, and he threw over at his wife a
look of inexpressible, cold scorn. Turning savagely away, he said in a
cutting tone, that seemed to go through her--

"Do you also despise your father's station, my boy?"

When Gjert blundered out then in his eagerness--

"Frederick Beck is going to be a cadet," it was followed simply by--

"Come here, Gjert!"--and he received a blow that sent him staggering
against the table. A second was about to follow, when his father
happened to look up at his wife. She had sprung a couple of steps
forward, as if to take Gjert from him, and was standing now before him
with crimson face and flashing eyes, and with a bearing that made him,
at all events, lower his hand. She then turned away at once, and went
out into the kitchen.

Salve stood for a moment uncertain how to act. Then he went to the
kitchen door, and announced, shortly and sharply, that he and Gjert were
going to sea that evening--they would want provisions.

The wind and rain beat wildly against the black window-panes while
Elizabeth was carrying out his orders; but when she presently came in
with the ale-jar and what else they were to take with them, not a trace
of anxiety, or of her former emotion, was to be detected. Her face was
pale, and stony-calm; and there was something almost humble in her
bearing towards her husband. But when, for a moment, she and Gjert were
left alone together in the house, drawing him hastily towards her, she
whispered, in a voice choked with repressed emotion--

"Never let your father see that you are afraid, my boy."

She bade her husband farewell at the door; and there was foul weather
both within and without the pilot as he put to sea that evening.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Elizabeth was more agitated even than usual after a scene of this kind.
When he had struck her son, her indignation had almost mastered her; and
it frightened her now to think how near she had been to an explosion.
This time the so-often-repeated excuses which she had accustomed herself
to make for him would not suggest themselves; and as she lay awake in
the stillness of the night, and looked back through the years that were
gone, it seemed as if she was struggling and labourin