In _Sir Bengt's Wife_, the other play of this period, he gives us an historical drama of marriage, in which love rises triumphant and purified through life's difficulties and misunderstandings. Sir Bengt has fallen in love with the nun who is doing penance for the sinful response of her unruly woman's heart. He delivers her from the tyranny of the abbess, and the wedding festivities promise a life-long feast for the bold knight and his fair lady. But the fates are jealous of so much happiness, such blending of strength and beauty, and disaster overtakes them in the person of the king's bailiff who demands the payment of a heavy fine in consequence of the knight's negligence in not having provided the king with a mounted soldier. Sir Bengt is unable to pay, and loses his knighthood. The unscrupulous bailiff, who has designs upon Lady Margit, helps Sir Bengt to accept the services of a moneylender by which complete ruin is averted. Sir Bengt conceals his trouble from his bride, and seeks to redeem his position by hard and honest work. A child is born, but the harmony between husband and wife is disturbed through misunderstandings. To Lady Margit the change in her husband is distressing: he works like a peasant, and has become oblivious of the arts and graces of knightly conduct. One day when, by ignorance and womanish love of the beautiful, she has thwarted his plan for the restitution of his property he lifts his hand to strike her. Protected by the Reformation, which has now been accomplished, she asks the king to dissolve her marriage with a brutal and unworthy man. The wicked bailiff is watching the disruption of the home with satisfaction, and succeeds in gaining Lady Margit's affection. Fortunately she discovers the villainy of his plan, and tastes the reprobation of "the world" in time. The _dénouement_ of the play is reached by a reconciliation between husband and wife, following upon the mutual discovery of sterling merit and the inviolability of marriage, parenthood and home. The simplicity of the love-drama, the inherent goodness of the characters, including the Father Confessor who, to fit the general harmony, kills the phantoms of his lower nature is scarcely Strindbergian. One dominant note rings clear and undefiled through the three plays of this period: the sense of the sacredness of paternity. The pathos and tragedy of fatherhood are interwoven in many of Strindberg's plays, but generally entangled in a multitude of disturbing emotions.