Yes, good men, carry him home! Lift him up on your shoulders and carry him home! He has been God’s plaything, he has been driven like a feather before his breath. Carry him home! That wounded head has rested on the hard barrack-bed in the prison, on sheaves of straw in the barn. Let it now come home and rest on a soft pillow! He has suffered undeserved shame and torment, he has been hunted from his own door. He has been a wandering fugitive, following the paths of God where he could find them; but his promised land was that home whose gates God had closed to him. Perhaps his house stands open for one who has died to save women and children. Now he does not come as a malefactor, escorted by reeling boon-companions; he is followed by a sorrowing people, in whose cottages he has lived while he helped their sufferings. Carry him home! And so they do. Six men lift the board on which he lies on their shoulders and carry him away from the fair-grounds. Wherever they pass, the people move to one side and stand quiet; the men uncover their heads, the women courtesy as they do in church when God’s name is spoken. Many weep and dry their eyes; others begin to tell what a man he had been,—so kind, so gay, so full of counsel and so religious. It is wonderful to see, too, how, as soon as one of his bearers gives out, another quietly comes and puts his shoulder under the board. So Captain Lennart comes by the place where the pensioners are standing. “I must go and see that he comes home safely,” says Beerencreutz, and leaves his place at the roadside to follow the procession to Helgesäter. Many follow his example. The fair-grounds are deserted. Everybody has to follow to see that Captain Lennart comes home. When the procession reaches Helgesäter, the house is silent and deserted. Again the colonel’s fist beats on the closed door. All the servants are at the Fair; the captain’s wife is alone at home. It is she again who opens the door. And she asks, as she asked once before,— “What do you want?” Whereupon the colonel answers, as he answered once before,— “We are here with your husband.” She looks at him, where he stands stiff and calm as usual. She looks at the bearers behind him, who are weeping, and at all that mass of people. She stands there on the steps and looks into hundreds of weeping eyes, who stare sadly up at her. Last she looks at her husband, who lies stretched out on the bier, and she presses her hand to her heart. “That is his right face,” she murmurs. Without asking more, she bends down, draws back a bolt, opens the hall-doors wide, and then goes before the others into the bedroom. The colonel helps her to drag out the big bed and shake up the pillows, and so Captain Lennart is once more laid on soft down and white linen. “Is he alive?” she asks. “Yes,” answers the colonel. “Is there any hope?” “No. Nothing can be done.” There was silence for a while; then a sudden thought comes over her.