"Tell him I know all about it. He can go back again." "Can't very well do that, when he's been at the trouble to come." Joel walked away, and came back a moment later with the Pastor and a young man. The priest walked up to the weeping woman. "Joel tells me you've heard already, Mor Elversson," he said. "About Sven. He was concerned in a very unpleasant business, and his adopted parents sent him away." Mor Elversson had risen to curtsey to the Pastor. She still held a corner of her apron to her eyes, but, for all her weeping, she caught a glimpse of the stranger with him. "It's Sven," said a voice within her. "Sven...." A host of thoughts crowded into her mind. She realized that Joel had lied to her, in his anger at her heartlessness. She felt, too, that she would never be able to overcome the sorrow she had felt on hearing that her son had tasted human flesh. She saw that they would have to keep this son at home with them now, since no one else would have him in their service. But in the midst of all these cold reflections she saw how thin and pale the boy looked, how his eyes begged her sympathy, and a wave of pity and love rose in her heart. "Eh, Joel, Joel," she thought. "Always strange in his ways. He's shown me now what I am; made me see what I really feel. I know now, that for all the boy's been away from us all these years, and come back in disgrace, I can't but love him all the same." And, without a word to the Pastor, she stepped forward to her son and bade him welcome, her husband watching her anxiously the while. "Surely," she said, in her gentlest voice, "it was just for this that the trouble came--that Joel and I might have you back again." IN GOD'S HOUSE SVEN ELVERSSON, the man who had been greeted as a son by the two old folk at Grimön, sat in the church at Applum, thanking God that he had found a place of refuge where he was not looked upon with horror and disgust. On the lonely, rocky little island with its two poor inhabitants, he had no fear of encountering that downward curve of the lips that signified loathing. His father was an old man, and felt no disgust toward him, having no strong feelings any longer in that way. His mother was sensitive as ever, but she loved him. The church in which he sat was an old wooden building, the ceiling decorated with a great picture of the Judgment. And every time he looked up he found himself involuntarily gazing at a big, black, grinning devil, who was thrusting fuel under a cauldron filled with sinners boiling in a sulphurous broth. Sven Elversson knew that particular fiend of old, from the time when he had been in that very church seventeen years before. A striking feature was the long tail, cloven in three at the tip, which he used with great dexterity to stir the boiling mess.