TWO days later, Lotta Hedman sat in a hired cart, jolting on along a stony road in the parish of Algeröd, in the eastern part of Bohuslän, far from the sea, right up on the Dalsland side. "Heavens!" she thought, looking round; "this is worse than Lappland. Bare rock everywhere--I never saw the like in all my life. How can anyone live and get their wherewithal in such a desert?" And indeed the country she was passing through was little more than a level stretch of rocky upland. Heather and juniper, moss and stunted fir showed here and there, but the rock was everywhere. The more she looked at her surroundings, the more her spirits sank. "What could Sigrun and her husband have been thinking of," she wondered, "to move out to a place like this? They were not so badly off before, by all accounts. Close to the sea, with a well-to-do congregation, and people round about. What possessed them to come out to a wilderness like this?" The stony waste seemed filling her with its own desolation. "There's no living to be got here, for priest nor any other. Well, if they've not enough to have me with them, I'll just have to go back home again, that's all." At the moment, she felt doubtful if she had acted wisely in coming thus to visit Sigrun without an invitation, or even sending word herself beforehand of her coming. She ought at any rate to have sent a message through Sigrun's parents, or let her know in some way. "_Herre Gud_!" she thought to herself, as she drove on. "And six years now since Sigrun left her home at Stenbroträsk, and all that time I've hardly heard a word of her. A letter or two the first year, and then I saw her once or twice the summer she came home to visit her people, but neither of us did anything really to be friends again like we used. "I can't forget the beautiful letter she wrote me when her little daughter was born. I was so glad. And she wanted me to come to her then and help her with the little one. But I couldn't leave them at home, and I didn't really want to, I suppose. It seemed hard to go and stay with Sigrun as a maid, and I was afraid of her husband, too. Anyhow, I've regretted it since, for when the child died I couldn't help thinking it might have lived if I had been there helping Sigrun as she asked. And perhaps she thinks so too. I've never heard a word from her since then." She felt a weight at her heart. Perhaps, after all, the long journey would come to nothing.