"The best thing for him would be to keep you," said Lotta decidedly. "But I cannot!" cried Sigrun despairingly. "You don't know what it means to be watched every hour, never to be free. You don't know what it is, with all these terrible scenes and quarrels and promises to be better, when it never is better, and ill-humour and misery. You don't know what it is to go in constant fear of something dreadful happening. To be always forced to lie and hide things, though you have done nothing but what was good and right. Oh, you don't know what it is like, or you would not ask me to go back." "No," said Lotta--"no, angel dear, I did not know you had suffered like that. You have never spoken of it until yesterday and to-day. But is there no other way?" Sigrun rose to her feet. "There is one way. And God has sent it. But Lotta Hedman will not let me take that way." Nothing could describe the torturing power of Sigrun's beauty as she spoke such words as these. A witchery seemed to emanate from her being, and she knew it, and never, perhaps, had she used it so mercilessly, so victoriously as to-night. "I am doing no wrong, Lotta," she said. "I am going to the war, to help the wounded. That is my one desire. I am ashamed to stay at home doing nothing. You know it is what I have longed for all my life. And God is helping me, Lotta. Why will you not help me?" What could poor Lotta Hedman say? She had never loved Sigrun as she did this night. She resisted still, knowing that Rhånge came of a family of suicides. Perhaps he would kill himself if he lost his wife. But she dared not say anything of this to Sigrun; it might only increase her fear of him. "But you have your father and mother at home," was all she could find to say. "You forget the infection. I cannot go home to them now." She went over to Lotta and made her sit down again in the chair. "Lotta, I am so unhappy," she said. "Every day is an agony. Am I to suffer like this all my life?" "But, Sigrun, how can you bring this sorrow on us all?" "Sorrow?" said Sigrun--"sorrow? What is it, after all, to sorrow for the dead? What is it compared with sorrowing for the living? I must do it, Lotta, for Edward's sake. Think what a man he was when I first met him. Calm, happy, eager to make his way. A good preacher, and loved by his congregation. Now--can you not see how he has changed? He is going to ruin here in poverty and loneliness. I must leave him, Lotta. If I were dead, he would find another place, another living, where he could rise to all that he meant to do when he had the ill-fortune to meet me." "You cannot make me see that you need do anything so dreadful." Sigrun shrugged her shoulders.