that she was waiting faithfully for him although he had cast her off.
All the ice must melt and disappear; he was a rich man in spite of
everything.

Did she bear his name? he asked eagerly. It would be like her--intrepid
as she was--defiantly to write "Pelle" in large letters on the door-
plate.

Yes, of course! There was no such thing as hiding there! Lasse Frederik
and his sister were big now, and little Boy Comfort was a huge fellow
for his age--a regular little fatty. To see him sitting in his
perambulator, when they wheeled him out on Sundays, was a sight for
gods!

Pelle stood in the darkness as though stunned. Boy Comfort, a little
fellow sitting in a perambulator! And it was not an adopted child
either; Druk-Valde so evidently took it to be his. Ellen! Ellen!

He went no more to the wall. Druk-Valde knocked in vain, and his six
months came to an end without Pelle noticing it. This time he made no
disturbance, but shrank under a feeling of being accursed. Providence
must be hostile to him, since the same blow had been aimed at him twice.
In the daytime he sought relief in hard work and reading; at night he
lay on his dirty, mouldy-smelling mattress and wept. He no longer tried
to overthrow his conception of Ellen, for he knew it was hopeless: she
still tragically overshadowed everything. She was his fate and still
filled his thoughts, but not brightly; there was indeed nothing bright
or great about it now, only imperative necessity.

And then his work! For a man there was always work to fall back upon,