An incident which she concealed from her husband had kept her back and prevented her gaining strength, therefore she was so languid. She too had quietly been over to her brother's the first time she was able to go out; she, too, had been met by Sigrid on the steps telling her that he was not at home;--but she had seen him standing on the veranda as she came up. With great difficulty she reached home again. She had felt the deepest pity for him and was ready to make all manner of allowances; but his inexorableness aroused her opposition. Josephine had not the slightest idea that she herself had been jealous of Ragni, therefore she could not know that it affected her manner. She considered herself to have been at fault in being intolerant toward one who was guilty. As Sissel Aune sat upstairs beside the boy, and told her all about Ragni, how she had been lovable to the very last, she felt how unnatural it was to have overlooked Ragni's goodness of heart and Kallem's love for her. But beyond this intolerance she did not consider herself to blame. The disappointment was great, and the consequences might have been serious if it had not been that she was so much taken up just then with her husband's struggles. A person of confused ideas, who has chiefly lived a defiant life, can only be freed when some great event happens. And such an event it was, the day that Ole said to her: "On this, Josephine, we must stake both the living and our fortune." Three months had gone by when she, revived by the fight, thought herself strong enough to take up the case with her brother. She wrote to him and said that whatever they might have done wrong--they would wish to hear it right out; they ought to be worthy to be accused. Their gratitude to him was great, as they repented of their former intolerance, and wished to make every possible amends to that spirit of charity and justice which they had misjudged. It was an excellent letter; her husband said so too. But the days went and there came no answer. It was a mercy that just at that time Tuft was fighting some of his hardest battles. At the meeting-house, and afterwards in church, he had made use of the words Josephine had concluded her letter with. "Justice and charity," without distinction of faith (as in the story of the good Samaritan), is the essence of Christianity. Therefore must everything be meted out with this measure, and first and foremost the doctrine itself, so that the smallest particle weighed and found wanting fell, like the theology of distant and cruel times, before the revelation of justice in our day.