On Saturday evening she had flung herself upon her bed, as weary as though she had passed the day in the hardest manual labour. She lay there and looked at the yards of a ship which was being towed past. She watched the folds in the loosely hanging sails which were swaying in the wind. The vessel was so near that she could almost have touched her. Outside there was a heavy sea, the storm driving the swell up into the harbour: she, too, longed to find a haven! It was Saturday evening, to-morrow she would have to go to church. Karl Vangen's face smiled to her as she remembered this, and she felt happy before she fell asleep. If he had been a girl she would have gone to him--just to _him_--with the trouble which oppressed her. The next day she occupied a seat at the furthest end of the church. Karl Vangen had met her, and said how nice it was that she was coming up to them again to help Fru Rendalen. On account of this remark she had chosen the most remote seat; she did not feel sure that she might not begin to cry. She did not, however; there was something soothing in the church and the stillness and the people, which was unlike the summer day outside. But when Karl Vangen went into the pulpit, and his prayer was the one which he had used on her first school-day--that on meeting, almost word for word the same--it disturbed her: that even Karl Vangen's prayer should be a lesson from earlier days. This little coincidence occupied her, and she did not follow him. She gathered that the sermon dealt with conversion, and that Karl Vangen, as was his custom, illustrated what he was saying by examples from real life. But she had heard these examples at school, every one of them.