"Do not think that," said he. "That girl--the Dean's daughter from Stenbroträsk--you might talk to me of her all the rest of the way, and I should not be tired of hearing. And then I suppose you were friends after the day you went out in the boat together?" "Yes," said Lotta Hedman; "we were good friends--that is true. We went out in the boat nearly every evening, as long as the lessons lasted. Sigrun liked to sit in a boat and just drift up and down, not going anywhere, but just drifting. She did not care for steamers nor for railways, and did not care for driving with horses, but she loved to drift about in a little boat. And the thing she longed for most of all was the sea." The man sitting opposite bowed his head once more and covered his eyes. "True," he thought to himself. "She longed to see the sea. She told me that. How she had longed for it ever since she was a child of fifteen. But it was given to me to show her that. At least, I have done one good thing in my life." Lotta Hedman did not need much encouragement from a listener; she went on, undisturbed, with her story. "Then I thought, as soon as the confirmation classes were over, we should never see each other again, but all that summer after, Sigrun came down to the shore nearly every day, and we rowed up and down the river for hours together. And so it went on, summer after summer; it was the happiest time in all my life." The man sighed. "Why have you come back, Sigrun?" he whispered to himself. "You, so young and good, so beautiful and unspoiled, why do you come back to me now? I have tried to think of you as a woman ageing, a mother of children, a loving and affectionate wife. Why do you come now in all the freshness of youth?" "And now I must tell you the end of that friendship," said Lotta Hedman. "After it had lasted four years, I was sitting at home one Sunday afternoon in spring, looking at a big red-painted farmhouse that grew up outside the east window. One wing showed out after another, and I was wondering what sort of a house it could be, and why it was being built up so grandly just that evening. "It was getting late, and nearing twilight already. Father and mother had been to church that morning, and were sitting on either side of the hearth, smoking and talking. But I sat at the window, watching the house grow up against the grey evening sky. "It was a red house on two floors, set high on a hill with a lot of old apple trees on the slope in front, and on one side of the orchard I could see a cowshed and barn, and on the other, stables and outhouses and a big stone store-cellar with one little room built over. "Close by the store-cellar was a tree, of a sort I did not know. It was all knotty and rough, with a thick trunk and wide-spreading branches, and looked ever so old--there was something misshapen and threatening about it. "Father and mother, sitting by the hearth, sat without speaking now--just thinking together. They knew each other so well.