As soon as he had said this he hid his head. He shook so much over his boldness that he nearly let the lid fall. But the white mist which had been before Ingrid's eyes disappeared completely when she heard a human being speaking. She saw a man standing in the corner, at the foot of the coffin, holding a coffin-lid before him. She saw at once that she could not lie down again and think it was a vision. Surely he was a reality, which she must try and make out. It certainly looked as if the coffin were a coffin, and the grave a grave, and that she herself a few minutes ago was nothing but a swathed and buried corpse. For the first time she was terror-stricken at what had happened to her. To think that she could really have been dead that moment! She could have been a hideous corpse, food for worms. She had been placed in the coffin for them to throw earth upon her; she was worth no more than a piece of turf; she had been thrown aside altogether. The worms were welcome to eat her; no one would mind about that. Ingrid needed so badly to have a fellow-creature near her in her great terror. She had recognized the Goat directly he put up his head. He was an old acquaintance from the parsonage; she was not in the least afraid of him. She wanted him to come close to her. She did not mind in the least that he was an idiot. He was, at any rate, a living being. She wanted him to come so near to her that she could feel she belonged to the living and not to the dead. 'Oh, for God's sake, come close to me!' she said, with tears in her voice. She raised herself in the coffin and stretched out her arms to him. But the Dalar man only thought of himself. If she were so anxious to have him near her, he resolved to make his own terms. 'Yes,' he said, 'if you will go away.' Ingrid at once tried to comply with his request, but she was so tightly swathed in the sheet that she found it difficult to get up. 'You must come and help me,' she said. She said this, partly because she was obliged to do it, and partly because she was afraid that she had not quite escaped death. She must be near someone living. He actually went near her, squeezing himself between the coffin and the side of the grave. He bent over her, lifted her out of the coffin, and put her down on the grass at the side of the open grave. Ingrid could not help it. She threw her arms round his neck, laid her head on his shoulder and sobbed. Afterwards she could not understand how she had been able to do this, and that she was not afraid of him. It was partly from joy that he was a human being--a living human being--and partly from gratitude, because he had saved her.