This anxiety is sharpened by the approach of the Christmas season, which she feels should be celebrated as a beautiful home festival, just by themselves. But even as Olga carries her point and Ruster is about to leave the house, she is assailed by remorse for the selfish impulse to protect her home at the unfortunate old man’s expense. This should be clearly indicated in the tone and manner with which she asks Liljekrona to give Ruster something extra for Christmas and to lend him his fur coat. The departure of Ruster ends the first stage of the play’s action, in which Olga has attempted to secure happiness for herself and her household by the refusal of her hospitality to some one in sore need of it. Ruster had seemed to her a discordant element when present, but his absence seems to bring ten-fold more unhappiness. All the Christmas preparations go wrong. Sigurd’s cookie-dough figure of the Christ-Child “doesn’t look like anything,” the E string of Liljekrona’s fiddle has snapped and he has no new one, Torstein has gone to drive Ruster and they cannot dance without him, the sheaves for the sparrows have been forgotten, and finally Liljekrona withdraws to his own room to play the stormy music which Olga understands as a portent of his return to the old life of wandering. In this section of the play, Liljekrona controls the action and should dominate the scene. Olga attempts, in vain, to infuse joy into the Christmas observances. Liljekrona’s bitterly self-reproachful speech about the lonely and the hungry people,--“When they pass so close as to touch our sleeve,--we do not see them, we do not stop them, but let them plod their path alone,”--shows that he will no longer deceive himself as to the heartlessness of their own action. And when he says--“Your candles are too late. The door is closed. The voice is gone,”--Olga sees that on the eve of Christmas and in the name of its fitting observance, she has betrayed its very spirit of hospitality and kindness. The sound of the music from Liljekrona’s room, full of the old, wild passion for the open road, brings to Olga realization of the price she must pay for this mistake, “if God does not work a miracle in the night.” Her intense suffering at this point marks the crucial moment in the play and must be conveyed by action and facial expression as well as by a poignant rendering of the lines. The moment must be held perceptibly, after she sinks into her chair, until the sound of sleighbells, at first far off and gradually approaching, breaks the spell.