Carl Beck understood very well what she was going through, and would occasionally throw her an encouraging look; but Elizabeth affected always not to understand it.  On one occasion, however, when she was corrected in his presence, she hurriedly left the room, and throwing herself on her bed, lay there and sobbed as if her heart would break.

She had been trusted one afternoon, shortly after, to bring in the tea-tray, on which, without thinking what she was doing, she had placed the chafing-dish with the boiling teakettle.  It fell as she was carrying it in; but although its hot side and the boiling water burnt and scalded her arm and hand, she carried the tray quite quietly out again without allowing a muscle of her face to change—­she was not going to be corrected before him again.

Madam Beck herself bound up her hand in the kitchen, where she stood white with pain; while Carl, who had been sitting on the sofa, and had seen how the whole thing happened, forgetting his self-command, had jumped up in great excitement, and had shown such uncommon sympathy that his sister Mina, afterwards, when they were alone in the room together, said, with a look that was more searching than the joking words seemed to require, “It is not possible you are fond of the girl, Carl?”

“No fear, Mina,” he answered quickly, in the same tone, chucking her under the chin as he spoke.  “There are as handsome girls as her in Arendal; but you can see as well as I can that she is a girl in a hundred.  That business with the tea-tray is what very few others would have been capable of; and we mustn’t forget that if it had not been for her—­”

“Oh yes,” rejoined Mina, with a toss of her head, a little tired of the eternal repetition of this stock observation.  “She didn’t know all the same that it was papa who was out there.”

It was a game of hypocrisy, thought out with no inconsiderable subtlety, that the handsome lieutenant was carrying on in this matter:  under his apparently so entirely frank sailor-bearing there was hidden a real diplomatist.  By trumpeting about the town the service which Elizabeth had rendered them in saving the Juno, he had, one may say, forced his family to take her up, though to them he made it appear that public opinion left them no alternative.  On the other hand, he was uncommonly cautious in his attitude towards Elizabeth herself; for he knew he must win her without attracting the attention of his stepmother and sisters.  He believed he had made a sort of impression upon her; but at the same time he felt that he had a wild swan to deal with, that might at any moment spread its wings and fly away—­there was such a strong, independent individuality about her.