—“Now am I come so far I scarce can understand why God hath laid so many and such heavy sorrows upon me—for I have striven faithfully to do His will. Why hath He taken our children from us, Ragnfrid, one by one—first our sons—then little Ulvhild—and now I have given her that I loved dearest, honourless, to an untrusty and a witless man. Now is there none left to us but the little one—and unwise must I deem it to take joy in her, before I see how it will go with her—with Ramborg.” Ragnfrid shook like a leaf. Then the man laid his arm about her shoulders: “Lie down,” he said, “and let us sleep—” He lay for a while with his head against his wife’s arm, sighing now and then, but at last he fell asleep. * * * * * It was still pitch-dark in the barn when Ragnfrid stirred—she wondered to find that she had slept. She felt about with her hands; Lavrans was sitting up with knees updrawn and his arms around them. “Are _you_ awake already?” she asked in wonder. “Are you cold?” “No,” said he in a hoarse voice, “but I cannot go to sleep again.” “Is it Kristin you are thinking on?” asked the mother. “Like enough ’twill go better than we think, Lavrans,” she said again. “Aye, ’tis of that I was thinking,” said the man. “Aye, aye—maid or woman, at least she is come to the bride-bed with the man she loves. And ’twas not so with either you or me, my poor Ragnfrid.” His wife gave a deep, dull moan, and threw herself down on her side amongst the hay. Lavrans put out a hand and laid it on her shoulder. “But ’twas that I _could_ not,” said he, with passion and pain. “No, I _could_ not—be as you would have had me—when we were young. I am not such a one—” In a while Ragnfrid said softly through her weeping: “Yet ’twas well with us in our life together—Lavrans—was it not?—all these years?” “So thought I myself,” answered he gloomily. Thoughts crowded and tossed to and fro within him. That single unveiled glance in which the hearts of bridegroom and bride had leapt together—the two young faces flushing up redly—to him it seemed a very shamelessness. It had been agony, a scorching pain to him, that this was his daughter. But the sight of those eyes would not leave him—and wildly and blindly he strove against the tearing away of the veil from something in his own heart, something that he had never owned was there, that he had guarded against his own wife when she sought for it. ’Twas that he _could_ not, he said again stubbornly to himself. In the devil’s name—he had been married off as a boy; he had not chosen for himself; she was older than he—he had not desired her; he had had no will to learn this of her—to love. He grew hot with shame even now when he thought of it—that she would have had him love her, when he had no will to have such love from her. That she had proffered him all this that he had never prayed for.