“Think you it can profit you aught to confess to me what you would hide from your true father confessor,” said the monk more severely. “If so be you cannot confess me,” said Kristin, “at least you can let me speak with you and ask your counsel about what lies upon my soul.” The monk looked about him. The church was empty at the moment. Then he sat himself down on a chest which stood in a corner: “You must remember that I cannot absolve you, but I will counsel you, and keep silence as though you had told me in confession.” Kristin stood up before him and said: “It is this: I cannot be Simon Darre’s wife.” “Therein you know well that I can counsel no otherwise than would your own prior,” said Brother Edwin. “To undutiful children God gives no happiness, and your father had looked only to your welfare—that you know full well.” “I know not what your counsel will be, when you have heard me to the end,” answered Kristin. “Thus stands it now with us: Simon is too good to gnaw the bare branch from which another man has broken the blossom.” She looked the monk straight in the face. But when she met his eyes and marked how the dry, wrinkled, old face changed, grew full of sorrow and dismay—something seemed to snap within her, tears, started to her eyes, and she would have cast herself upon her knees. But Edwin stopped her hurriedly: “Nay, nay, sit here upon the chest by me—confess you I cannot—” He drew aside and made room for her. She went on weeping; he stroked her hand, and said gently: “Mind you that morning, Kristin, I first saw you there on the stairway in the Hamar church—? I heard a tale once, when I was in foreign lands, of a monk, who could not believe that God loved all us wretched sinners—Then came an angel and touched his eyes, and he beheld a stone in the bottom of the sea, and under the stone there lived a blind, white, naked creature; and he gazed at it until he came to love it, for it was so frail and weak. When I saw you sitting there, so little and so frail, within the great stone house, methought it was but reason that God should love such as you. Fair and pure you were, and, yet did you need a helper and a protector. Methought I saw the whole church, with you in it, lying in the hollow of God’s hand.” Kristin said low: “We have bound ourselves one to the other with the dearest oaths—and I have heard that in the eyes of God such a pact hallows our coming together as much as if our fathers and mothers had given us one to the other.” The monk answered sadly: