"But I say no!" cried Hjelmfeldt's wife, with loud-voiced eagerness. "If he thinks it's wrong to harm the dead, then let him think how it's a thousand times worse to make up such devil's tools to cripple the living, and leave a man helpless and miserable all his life. You've never done that. You only tried all you could to help us." Sven Elversson went into the house to see her husband, and sat with him for a good while, listening to his troubles. Then he went on his way again. The next he met of those he knew before was Julia Lamprecht. She, too, came up and spoke to him. "You offered to marry me once," she said. "And I said I would never marry such a one as you. I have thought of that many a time since this war began. And I'd like you now to know I've been sorry for it. For what right had I to judge you for how you've acted by the dead? But those whose doings have left all the quarries in Bohuslän empty, and the workers idle, and their wives and children starving--they've wronged the living, and that's worse." Sven Elversson went on, and after a little while a young man whom he did not remember having seen before came up to him. "You won't know me, I dare say," said he. "I was only a boy when you left Grimön. But I was one of those that called after you in the street that time. And I'd like to ask your pardon for that now, for I've come to see how it's worse to wrong the living than to wrong the dead. I've been a pilot in the war, and been torpedoed three times, and each time some lives were lost. And I thought of you, and wondered why we that used to be so hard on you are so patient now. Seems as if it was only right for human beings to turn on one another like savages. And yet it can't be right, somehow...." On leaving the pilot, Sven Elversson climbed up to the top of a hill behind the village and stood for a long time looking out over the sea. "If the trouble of my life," he said, "could bring people to remember that life should be inviolable; that a living man should not be robbed of his life or hindered in its use, then, after all, some good would have grown up out of the bitter seed of my misery." IN THE NETS SOME days later, when Ung-Joel had slept his fill and was nearly recovered, Sven Elversson came down in the afternoon to Knapefiord harbour, and found the _Naiad_ lying in its usual place. Olaus from Fårön and Corfitzson and the others whom he knew were on board, making ready, like the rest of the fishing fleet, to put to sea. They were going out with the drift nets, far into the Kattegat. And Sven Elversson felt a sudden desire to go with them, and spend a night at sea.