And she herself was very happy; this was surely the greatest thing that had ever happened in her life. But at the same time she thought to herself: "Sigrun must be unhappy, indeed, if she weeps for joy at seeing one so poor as I." THE VICARAGE IT WAS an evening in November, when the days were short and the nights seemed as if they would never end. All the district round about the vicarage at Algeröd was quiet and still as in the vicarage itself. The horses had come in from the fields and were stabled, the cows had been milked, and the fowls had gone to their roost. In the brewhouse, or, rather, in the little room beside it, sat Lotta Hedman that still evening, busy with her calculations. She had the Bible before her, and pen and ink and paper, and was searching earnestly in her dear Book of Revelation. In the kitchen, in the main building, the fire had gone out, and cook and housemaid sat at the sewing-machine trying to reshape a blouse that the seamstress had somehow mismanaged; the man was in an adjoining room, stretched on a bench, waiting for supper-time to come. The priest was sitting in his study, but not at his writing-table. He sat in a rocking-chair in one corner of the room. A lamp was close by, and he was reading the paper. When he raised his eyes, he could see into the next room, where his wife was sitting on a low stool by the stove. She sat with her chin in her hands staring into the fire. Close beside her sat the Bailie, who was staying at the vicarage by arrangement. He was in poor health, and the Rhånges had been glad to take him in, since the sum he paid for his keep was a welcome aid to their scanty resources now they had moved to this poor living up in the waste lands. He was a man of about fifty, who had never done anything but please himself all his life, until at last his affairs had been taken out of his hands, and he himself had been sent up to a place where he would have no opportunity of wasting the little that remained to him of money and health. The Bailie showed traces of a stroke he had had some time before: one side of his face was drawn awry, and the left eyelid hung down and could hardly be opened, but, for all that, he was a fine-looking man, of good bearing. He was a man of the world, had travelled much, and was intelligent and interesting to talk to. He had drawn up a chair near the fire, and was telling Sigrun about foreign lands, that she had never seen and never would see, now that she sat buried here in a little parsonage in Sweden. Sigrun was busy with her own thoughts and her restless desires, and let his words pass idly by. She she could have listened to what he was saying; it would have perhaps dispelled her weariness and longing if she could. But it was beyond her power.