"Sigrun is pity itself," he thought. "Mercy is her aim, her task. I should have realized it." The sudden acknowledgment of his own fault comforted him now. Sigrun no longer appeared to have sunk so low, to be so unspeakably hard and without feeling. He turned the thought over in his mind. "Yes," he said to himself. "That must be why we were never happy together. I hindered her from being what her nature commanded her to be." Then, suddenly, the old agony returned. "This fellow, Sven Elversson, he cares for her better than I. He too is given up to works of charity. And that is why she stays with him." He had not thought of Sven Elversson with any jealousy before. "Sigrun knows what he has done," he had said to himself. "She could never love him." But now, the whole thing seemed more than suspicious. Why had Sven Elversson not told him at once that Sigrun had come to Hånger? Was he in love with her, and had he thought to keep her for himself? But in the midst of his anger came one of those thoughts that seemed to hover in the air above that desolate land, and refreshed the soul of the unhappy man like cool summer rain. "Have you any right to expect service and aid from Sven Elversson?" said the thought. And the priest remembered how he had sinned against Sven Elversson, and ruined his life, and condemned him to nameless misery. But this consciousness of his own guilt brought a strange soothing calm in the midst of his anger--at the wrong he had suffered from others. It was like a cooling drink to one in fever. And a new humility, a self-knowledge, woke in his mind. He no longer felt himself as the punishing avenger with all right on his side. He was prepared now, not to forgive, but to search and examine with care before passing his final judgment. THE LIFTING OF THE CURSE THE priest checked his horse. There below him, in the glow of the evening sun, was Hånger itself. For a moment he doubted whether it could be right. He had always heard the place described as consisting of large buildings. Here, the main part was certainly of decent size, but all the rest seemed small and insignificant. But the orchard was there. On the slope between the small houses grew tall, century-old apple trees, now in their finest bloom, making a roof of delicate white and pink above the lawn. And the old oak was there, not yet in full leaf, but well on the way to clothe its wrinkled, knotty branches with soft, leafy green. And the view was there, too. A view out over a marvellously fine and light and softly drawn landscape, where the ten mountain ridges and the ten lakes lay now, at the hour of sunset, decked in every imaginable hue, one height a brilliant white, and another threateningly dark; one lake like a sheet of polished steel, and its fellow behind the next hill glittering all in gold.