He gave orders that Lotta Hedman should stay where she was on account of the infection, and no one was to go near her. Even if the Pastor himself were to send for her, she was not to go. He and Lotta together laid the body in the coffin, which was afterward carried away to a hastily dug grave. No investigation was made, hardly a question asked. The vicarage was for a time cut off from all the rest of the district. That the vicar's wife should give out that she was dead while in fact still alive was a thing too unheard of for any to suspect. "It is that knife-grinder that has been going about the district these last few weeks--he must have brought the infection over from Norway," was the general view. "His wife was ill, too, and ran away from him in her delirium." The doctor's words were also called to mind; the disease must have been there before any knew of it. And the longest and most agonizing day Lotta Hedman had ever known came to an end without any discovery of what had been done. Sigrun glanced now and again at the driver sitting on the edge of the sledge. It was still dark night, and she could only vaguely distinguish the outline of the figure--the broad-brimmed hat, the upraised shoulder, the short nose, and the sullen mouth. "It is not a man sitting there," she told herself, "but Death. I did not know him when he came first, but I know him now. And who else could it be? I have given myself up into his power. And he has come to fetch me and carry me away to his own land." They drove on over wide and desolate mountain tracts, covered with snow. A few scattered, stunted trees and bushes here and there rendered the barrenness of the country still more marked. "It is the kingdom of Death," she said to herself. And she, who had a while ago been so eager, active, and commanding, felt herself now sinking into a quiet calm. The effort of will was at an end, hopes and desires were gone. It is dangerous, perhaps, for a mortal to make an ally of Death. For Death may take it in earnest. And Sigrun seemed really to feel a change taking place in herself. All the links that bound her to her former life were being loosened one by one. Love of her husband, the sorrow and misery of her married life, had filled all her thoughts before. But now, all this faded and disappeared. A great void was where it had been, but no regrets, no bitterness. "The dead must feel like this," she thought. "Thus it must be to be freed from all earthly things. Love and sorrow disappear." Little foolish things she had said as a child, and had been ashamed of ever since, little offences that had troubled her long, little humiliations she had never forgotten--all these vanished now in a moment. Hereafter, she would think of these as things that no longer concerned her.