Then one day Sigrun wanted something to read, and Lotta brought her a newspaper. She lay for a long time reading the advertisements of steamer routes and railway connections. Then she laid the paper aside. Lotta paid no heed to that at the time, but afterward she remembered. In the course of that one quiet week, the winter had come in earnest. It was not particularly cold, but a good deal of snow had fallen, and the ground was white all round. The snow was deep enough, indeed, for sledges. This whiteness outside her window reminded Sigrun of her home and the long winters there--and the thought seemed to cheer her. On the day when the first snow came, she got up and dressed. "That's right, my angel," said Lotta Hedman. "You'll get strong all the sooner, if you sit up a little. I'm sure now we shall have you well by Christmas." Sigrun stopped suddenly in her dressing. "Will it be Christmas soon?" she asked. "I had forgotten all about Christmas." She was plainly distressed at being reminded of the coming feast. The impossibility of spending Christmas anywhere but in her home seemed to strike her. "If anything's to be done, it must be done before then," she murmured. "I must have it all over before Christmas." Lotta Hedman heard what she said, but thought it referred to some ordinary preparations for Christmas which must be completed in time. One evening, Lotta Hedman told Sigrun about the man she had met in the train. She described his appearance, his gentle, pleasant voice, his humility. "He was so kind to me," she said. "But just as one of my visions was coming, he ran away." "What sort of a vision?" asked Sigrun. "Something from the far north," said Lotta. "I saw a field of ice, and a black tent, and a long sledge." Sigrun lay without speaking, searching her memory. "Lotta," she said, after a while, "this is a strange thing. It must be Sven Elversson, and no other, that you met. He is just as you said to look at, and it would be just like him to run away as soon as you began to see visions that would remind him of ice-fields and the Arctic." "Who is Sven Elversson?" asked Lotta. Sigrun roused herself a little from her dreamy state and told Lotta something of Sven Elversson's story. "I wish I knew where he is now," she said at last. "He was a very good man, and very unhappy. I believe he felt himself so despised, so trodden underfoot, that he looked on it as his business to attend to things which others counted themselves too good for. Once he let himself be shut up in a cell with a murderer, to get him to confess. He married a woman from a children's school, one of the ugliest creatures I have ever seen. That was out of sheer humility, too, I suppose. When we lived at Applum, everybody spoke of him. But he moved away from there before we did." Lotta Hedman remembered her travelling companion's gentle voice and the feeling of confidence with which he had inspired her.