d upon her head, was explaining to Nikolai, who
was sitting in the kitchen.

Nikolai's face did not look as if he saw any help for it. On the
contrary, he sat bending forward with compressed lips, looking down at
the floor and twirling his thumbs. His hair as well as the position of
his shoulders and his whole expression looked combative.

Barbara sat down by the cooking-stove; she drew a heavy breath, and
sighed out of an oppressed breast.

It would come to an execution as sure as she lived--and it was for
thirty-eight dollars!

Nikolai knew well what she was coming to, and that she was only waiting
for him to give her a word that she could hang on to; but this money
that he had scraped together was held much faster. He knew what he
wanted, and this trade was only going farther and farther backwards, in
any case.

Barbara groaned. She might as well go into the black ground at once.

Nikolai only snapped his fingers and looked down, doubly decided, at the
crack in the floor.

When the pause had become unbearable any longer, and she saw clearly
that no answer was coming, she began to cry softly.

She _had_ thought, she sobbed, that when she had a son who was a smith's
foreman, she would not stand quite helpless in the world.

"You know, mother, how badly I am in want of money myself."

Again an obstinate silence, with continued sobbing and drying of eyes on
Barbara's side.

"It might be as well to consider whether the shop really paid?"
suggested Nikolai at last cautiously.

"Would he like her to give up like a cow to be slaughtered before
Christmas," she exclaimed angrily--"and no more money than that was!"

"I only meant it would be better to stop in time."

But these words had the effect of fire on gunpowder. She got up, as red
as a tile. Just so! Now _he_ wanted her to close!

She rushed--in a manner somewhat recalling the useful animal just
mentioned by herself, when it is trying to get loose--into the shop and
back again.

If Nikolai thought that she would give up and go bankrupt to be jeered
at by everybody, when she only needed to go down and borrow that little
of Ludvig, he was very much mistaken.

Barbara was quite flushed.

She would not let herself be ruined a second time for Nikolai's sake. It
was quite enough that he had injured her welfare once before in this
world. Yes, he need not sit and look at her with open mouth. What else
was she turned out of the Veyergangs' house for, where