And two days went by.

“If she comes out again this evening,” Falkenberg would say up in the woods, “I’ll sing that one about the poppy. I’d forgotten that.”

“You’ve forgotten Emma, too, haven’t you?” I ask.

“Emma? Look here, I’ll tell you what it is: you’re just the same as ever, that’s what you are.”

“Ho, am I?”

“Yes; inside, I mean. You wouldn’t mind taking Emma right there, with Fruen looking on. But I couldn’t do that.”

“That’s a lie!” I answered angrily. “You won’t see me tangled up in any foolery with the girls as long as I am here.”

“Ah, and I shan’t be out at nights with any one after. Think she’ll come this evening? I’d forgotten that one about the poppy till now. Just listen.”

Falkenberg sang the Poppy Song.

“You’re lucky, being able to sing like that,” I said. “But there’s neither of us’ll get her, for all that.”

“Get her! Why, whoever thought. . . . What a fool you are!”

“Ah, if I were young and rich and handsome, I’d win her all the same,” I said.

“If — and if. . . . So could I, for the matter of that. But there’s the Captain.”

“Yes, and then there’s you. And then there’s me. And then there’s herself and everybody else in the world. And we’re a couple of brutes to be talking about her like this at all,” said I, furious now with myself for my own part. “A nice thing, indeed, for two old woodcutters to speak of their mistress so.”

We grew pale and thin the pair of us, and the wrinkles showed up in Falkenberg’s drawn face; neither of us could eat as we used. And by way of trying to hide our troubles from each other, I went about talking all sorts of cheerful nonsense, while Falkenberg bragged loudly at every meal of how he’d got to eating too much of late, and was getting slack and out of form.

“Why, you don’t seem to eat anything at all,” Fruen would say when we came home with too much left of the food we had taken with us. “Nice woodcutters, indeed.”

“It’s Falkenberg that won’t eat,” said I.

“Ho, indeed!” said Falkenberg; “I like that. He’s given up eating altogether.”

Now and again when she asked us to do her a favour, some little service or other, we would both hurry to do it; at last we got to bringing in water and firewood of our own accord. But one day Falkenberg played me a mean trick: he came home with a bunch of hazel twigs for a carpet-beater, that Fruen had asked me expressly to cut for her.