fell into something of
his father's look and step, his smile, his lavish, careless air. "Well,
well--well, well--well, well," he seemed saying to himself. He might
almost, in his fancy, have had a neat iron-grey beard on his chin.

The little green steamboat rounded the point and lay in to the quay,
the gangways were run out, porters jumped aboard, and all the passengers
came bundling ashore. Peer wondered how he was to know her, this sister
whom he had never seen.

The crowd on deck soon thinned, and people began moving off from the
quay into the town.

Then Peer was aware of a young peasant-girl, with a box in one hand and
a violin-case in the other. She wore a grey dress, with a black kerchief
over her fair hair; her face was pale, and finely cut. It was his
mother's face; his mother as a girl of sixteen. Now she was looking
about her, and now her eyes rested on him, half afraid, half inquiring.

"Is it you, Louise?"

"Is that you, Peer?"

They stood for a moment, smiling and measuring each other with their
eyes, and then shook hands.

Together they carried the box up through the town, and Peer was so much
of a townsman already that he felt a little ashamed to find himself
walking through the streets, holding one end of a trunk, with a
peasant-girl at the other. And what a clatter her thick shoes made on
the pavement! But all the time he was ashamed to feel ashamed. Those
blue arch eyes of hers, constantly glancing up at him, what were they
saying? "Yes, I have come," they said--"and I've no one but you in all
the world--and here I am," they kept on saying.

"Can you play that?" he asked, with a glance at her violin-case.

"Oh well; my playing's only nonsense," she laughed. And she told how the
old sexton she had been living with last had not been able to afford a
new dress for her confirmation, and had given her the violin instead.

"Then didn't you have a new dress to be confirmed in?"

"No."

"But wasn't it--didn't you feel horrible, with the other girls standing
by you all dressed up fine?"

She shut her eyes for a moment. "Oh, yes--it WAS horrid," she said.

A little farther on she asked: "Were you boarded out at a lot of
places?"

"Five, I think."

"Pooh--why, that's nothing. I was at nine, I was." The girl was smiling
again.

When they came up to his room she stood for a moment looking round the
place. It was hardly what she had expected to find. And she had not been
in town lodgings bef