The priest answered, doubtless what he asked could be done. But on this the bare-footed monk who had spoken to Kristin on the tower stairs came forward and saluted them: “There is a man here in our guest-house who has an errand of his own to the shoemaker’s; he can bear your bidding thither, Lavrans Björgulfsön, and your daughter can go with him or bide at the cloister with me till you yourself are for home. I shall see to it that she has her food there.” Lavrans thanked him but said, “’Twere shame you should be troubled with the child, brother Edwin—” “Brother Edwin draws to himself all the children he can lay hands upon,” said Canon Martein and laughed. “’Tis in this wise he gets someone to preach to—” “Aye, before you learnéd lords here in Hamar I dare not proffer my poor discourses,” said the monk without anger, and smiling. “All I am fit for is to talk to children and peasants, but even so, ’tis not well, we know, to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.” Kristin looked up at her father beseechingly; she thought there was nothing she would like more than to go with brother Edwin. So Lavrans gave thanks again, and while her father and the priest went after the bishop’s train, Kristin laid her hand in the monk’s, and they went down towards the cloister, a cluster of wooden houses and a light-hued stone church far down by the lake-side. Brother Edwin gave her hand a little squeeze, and as they looked at one another they had both to laugh. The monk was thin and tall, but very stoop-backed; the child thought him like an old crane in the head, for ’twas little, with a small, shining, bald pate above a shaggy, white rim of hair, and set upon a long, thin, wrinkled neck. His nose was large too, and pointed like a beak. But ’twas something which made her light of heart and glad, only to look up into the long, narrow, deep-lined face. The old, sea-blue eyes were red-rimmed and the lids brown and thin as flakes. A thousand wrinkles spread out from them; the wizened cheeks with the reddish network of veins were scored with furrows which ran down towards the thin-lipped mouth, but ’twas as though Brother Edwin had grown thus wrinkled only through smiling at mankind.—Kristin thought she had never seen anyone so blithe and gentle; it seemed he bore some bright and privy gladness within which she would get to know of when he began to speak. They followed the fence of an apple-orchard where there still hung upon the trees a few red and golden fruit. Two Preaching Brothers in black and white gowns were raking together withered beanshaws in the garden. The cloister was not much unlike any other farm steading, and the guest-house whither the monk led Kristin was most like a poor peasant’s house, though there were many bedsteads in it. In one of the beds lay an old man, and by the hearth sat a woman swathing a little child; two bigger children, boy and girl, stood beside her.