longing he seemed to see Ellen standing there and beckoning. He ran now,
and took the stairs three or four at a time.

Just as he was about to pull the bell-cord, he heard strange voices
within, and paused as though paralyzed. The door looked cold and as if
it had nothing to do with him; and there was no door-plate. He went
slowly down the stairs and asked in the greengrocer's cellar below
whether a woman who sewed uppers did not live on the second floor to the
left. She had been forsaken by her husband and had two children--
_three_, he corrected himself humbly; What had become of them?

The deputy-landlord was a new man and could give him no information; so
he went up into the house again, and asked from door to door but without
any result. Poor people do not generally live long in one place.

Pelle wandered about the streets at haphazard. He could think of no way
of getting Ellen's address, and gave it up disheartened; in his forlorn
condition he had the impression that people avoided him, and it
discouraged him. His soul was sick with longing for a kind word and a
caress, and there was no one to give them. No eyes brightened at seeing
him out again, and he hunted in vain in house after house for some one
who would sympathize with him. A sudden feeling of hatred arose in him,
an evil desire to hit out at everything and go recklessly on.

Twilight was coming on. Below the churchyard wall some newspaper-boys
were playing "touch last" on their bicycles. They managed their machines
like circus-riders, and resembled little gauchos, throwing them back and
running upon the back wheel only, and bounding over obstacles. They had
strapped their bags on their backs, and their blue cap-bands flapped
about their ears like pennons.