And this might have been the case, too, had not the old seine-maker dropped in at Ruffluck one evening and been asked to stay for coffee.

The seine-maker, like most persons whose thoughts are far away and who do not keep in touch with what happens immediately about them, was always taciturn.  But when his coffee had been poured and he had emptied it into his saucer, to let it cool, it struck him that he ought to say something.

“To-day there’s bound to be a letter from Glory Goldie,” he said.  “I feel it in my bones.”

“We had greetings from her only a fortnight ago in her letter to the senator,” Katrina reminded him.

The seine-maker blew into his saucer a couple of times before saying anything more.  Whereupon he again found it expedient to bridge a long silence with a word or so.

“Maybe some blessing has come to the girl, and it has given her something to write about.”

“What kind of blessing might that be?” scouted Katrina.  “When you’ve got to drudge as a servant, one day is as humdrum as another.”

The seine-maker bit off a corner of a sugar-lump and gulped his coffee.  When he had finished an appalling stillness fell upon the room.

“It might be that Glory Goldie met some person in the street,” he blurted out, his half-dead eyes vacantly staring at space.  He seemed not to know what he was saying.

Katrina did not think it necessary to respond; so replenished his cup without speaking.

“Maybe the person she met was an old lady who had difficulty in walking,” the seine-maker went on in the same offhand manner, “and maybe she stumbled and fell when Glory Goldie came along.”

“Would that be anything to write about?” asked Katrina, weary of this senseless talk.

“But suppose Glory Goldie stopped and helped the old lady up?” pursued the seine-maker, “and she was so thankful to the girl for helping her that she opened her purse and gave her all of ten rix-dollars—­wouldn’t that be worth telling?”

“Why certainly,” said Katrina, “if it were true.  But this is just something you’re making up.”

“It is well, sometimes, to be able to indulge in little thought feasts,” contended the seine-maker, “they are often more satisfying than the real ones.”

“You’ve tried both kinds,” returned Katrina, “so you ought to know.”

The seine-maker went his way directly, and Katrina gave no further thought to his story.

As for Jan, he took it at first as idle chatter.  But lying abed, with nothing to take up his mind, presently he began to wonder if there was not some hidden meaning back of the seine-maker’s words.  The old man’s tone sounded a bit peculiar when he spoke of the letter.  Would he have sat there and made up such a long story only for talk’s sake?  Perhaps he had heard something.  Perhaps Glory Goldie had written to him?  It was quite possible that something so great had come to the little girl that she dared not send direct word to her parents, and wrote instead to the seine-maker, asking him to prepare them.