“You were the best husband to me,” said she with a little sob, and clung close to him. He pressed her to him strongly: “To-night I would fain sleep with you, Ragnfrid. And if you would be to me as you were in the old days, I should not be—such a fool—” The woman seemed to stiffen in his arms—she drew away a little: “’Tis Fast-time.” She spoke low,—in a strange, hard voice. “It is so.” He laughed a little. “You and I, Ragnfrid—we have kept all the fasts, and striven to do God’s bidding in all things. And now almost I could think—maybe we had been happier had we more to repent—” “Oh, speak not so—_you_,” she begged wildly, pressing her thin hands to his temples. “You know well I would not you should do aught but what you feel yourself is the right.” He drew her to him closely once more—and groaned aloud: “God help her. God help us all, my Ragnfrid—” Then: “I am weary,” he said, and let her go. “And ’tis time, too, for you to go to rest.” He stood by the door waiting, while she quenched the embers on the hearth, blew out the little iron lamp by the loom, and pinched out the glowing wick. Together they went across through the rain to the hall. Lavrans had set foot already on the loft-room stair, when he turned to his wife, who was still standing in the entry-door. He crushed her in his arms again, for the last time, and kissed her in the dark. Then he made the sign of the cross over his wife’s face, and went up the stair. Ragnfrid flung off her clothes and crept into bed. A while she lay and listened to her husband’s steps in the loft-room above; then she heard the bed creak, and all was still. Ragnfrid crossed her thin arms over her withered breasts: Aye, God help her. What kind of a woman was she, what kind of mother? She would soon be old now. Yet was she the same; though she no longer begged stormily for love, as when they were young and her passion had made this man shrink and grow cold when she would have had him be lover and not only husband. So had it been—and so, time after time, when she was with child, had she been humbled, beside herself with shame, that she had not been content with his lukewarm husband-love. And then, when things were so with her, and she needed goodness and tenderness—then he had so much to give; the man’s tireless, gentle thought for her, when she was sick and tormented, had fallen on her soul like dew. Gladly did he take up all she laid on him and bear it—but there was ever something of his own he would not give. She had loved her children, so that each time she lost one, ’twas as though the heart was torn from her—God, God! what woman was she then, that even then, in the midst of her torments, she could feel it as a drop of sweetness that he took her sorrow in to his heart and laid it close beside his own.