"I understand you do not wish me to speak of this at all," said Sigrun, "but I do so want to speak to you about it. Remember, to-morrow I shall not be here." "I took my part in it, of course," said Sven Elversson, "but I was so ill I remember nothing. Afterward, I heard the others talking about it, and I reproached them. But then they said I had no call to say anything, for I had been in it, too. And then I remembered, that they had forced me to ..." He had spoken with the greatest effort, the words seeming to force themselves painfully through his lips. And he could not finish. "You fancied you remembered," said Sigrun. "You know well enough it is impossible that you should have done it really. You would rather have died." "I did it," he said. "Do not try to think otherwise." "But I do think otherwise," said Sigrun, "and I want you to know that. All the time I have been here under your roof, I have felt convinced that it was not true. No one who knows you could believe it." Sven Elversson bent forward and grasped her hand. And very earnestly and simply he said: "You have been very good to me this evening. I can never thank you enough for this hour." She understood his meaning, and refrained from pursuing the subject further. "But at least you must let me thank you for these months at Hånger. I shall always think of this as the true home of charity. And I will try to make my own home like yours." "You can leave that till to-morrow," he said. She rose to her feet. "Do not go yet. It is the last evening." "Then read a little of Snoilsky." He opened the book, but closed it again. "It is too dark to read." "Then say something you know without the book. Let me hear Bjarni Thorarensen's 'Song to Sigrun.' I have often wanted to ask you, but I never dared." Sven Elversson made a gesture as if to refuse. "I shall not be here to-morrow," she said again, with a note in her voice impossible to resist. And he began to recite the Icelandic poet's passionate prayer to his love not to forsake him even though she should die and go to dwell in the mansions of heaven. "'Do not think I could not kiss a dead bride, or that I could not lay my arm about the waist of one pale in death and wrapped for burial.'" He sat with his face turned away from her, his head bowed forward, his eyes resting on some point in the far distance. But all that he had kept in check so well while they had been speaking, all that the soft enchantment of the evening, and the presence of the woman he loved, had not availed to loose, was freed in him now by the wild and powerful fervour of love that glowed through the poet's word. All his pent-up feeling poured out now in his voice. "'Does not the summer sun kiss with like warmth the ice-clad mountain peak and the reddest rose? Are not white lilies loveliest of all flowers?'" Sven Elversson's voice trembled in the rush of the storm of love that raged within him.