Axel sat dark and silent, but she went on. It was a long time back now, many years, the time she had first come to Maaneland. So, there, he could see 'twas not everything was found out, not by a long way! What would things be like if everything folk did got out? What about all the married people in the towns and the things they did? They killed their children before they were born--there were doctors who managed that. They didn't want more than one, or at most two children, and so they'd get in a doctor to get rid of it before it come. Ho, Axel need not think that was such a great affair out in the world! "Ho!" said Axel. "Then I suppose you did get rid of the last one too, that way?" "No, I didn't," she answered carelessly as could be, "for I dropped it," she said. But even then she must go on again about it being nothing so terrible if she had. She was plainly accustomed to think of the thing as natural and easy; it did not affect her now. The first time, perhaps, it might have been a little uncomfortable, something of an awkward feeling about it, to kill the child; but the second? She could think of it now with a sort of historic sense: as a thing that had been done, and could be done. Axel went out of the house heavy in mind. He was not so much concerned over the fact that Barbro had killed her first child--that was nothing to do with himself. That she had had a child at all before she came to him was nothing much either; she was no innocent, and had never pretended to be so, far from it. She had made no secret of her knowledge, and had taught him many things in the dark. Well and good. But this last child--he would not willingly have lost it; a tiny boy, a little white creature wrapped up in a rag. If she were guilty of that child's death, then she had injured him, Axel--broken a tie that he prized, and that could not be replaced. But it might be that he wronged her, after all: that she _had_ slipped in the water by accident. But then the wrapping--the bit of shirt she had taken with her.... Meantime, the hours passed; dinner-time came, and evening. And when Axel had gone to bed, and had lain staring into the dark long enough, he fell asleep at last, and slept till morning. And then came a new day, and after that day other days....