“There’s Rebecca crying,” said Inger, breaking in on Oline.  But she gave her a handful of wool.

Then a great thanksgiving speech from Oline:  ay, wasn’t it just as she had said to Barbro herself of Inger, and how there was not her like to be found for giving to folk; ay, she’d give till she was bare, and give her fingers to the bone, and never complain.  Ay, go in and see to the sweet angel, and never was there a child in the world so like her mother as Rebecca—­no.  Did Inger remember how she’d said one day as she’d never have children again?  Ah, now she could see!  No, better give ear to them as were grown old and had borne children of their own, for who should fathom the Lord His ways, said Oline.

And with that she padded off after Eleseus up through the forest, shrunken with age, grey and abject, and for ever nosing after things, imperishable.  Going to old Sivert now, to let him know how she, Oline, had managed to persuade Eleseus to come.

But Eleseus had needed no persuading, there was no difficulty there.  For, look you, Eleseus had turned out better, after all, than he’d begun; a decent lad in his way, kindly and easy-going from a child, only nothing great in the way of bodily strength.  It was not without reason he had been unwilling to come home this time; he knew well enough that his mother had been in prison for child-murder; he had never heard a word about it there in the town, but at home in the village every one would remember.  And it was not for nothing he had been living with companions of another sort.  He had grown to be more sensitive and finer feeling than ever before.  He knew that a fork was really just as necessary as a knife.  As a man of business, he used the terms of the new coinage, whereas, out in the wilds, men still counted money by the ancient Daler.  Ay, he was not unwilling to walk across the hills to other parts; here, at home, he was constantly forced to keep down his own superiority.  He tried his best to adapt himself to the others, and he managed well; but it was always having to be on his guard.  As, for instance, when he had first come back to Sellanraa a couple of weeks ago, he had brought with him his light spring overcoat, though it was midsummer; and when he hung it up on a nail, he might just as well have turned it so as to show the silver plate inside with his initials, but he didn’t.  And the same with his stick—­his walking-stick.  True, it was only an umbrella stick really, that he had dismantled and taken the framework off; but here he had not used it as he did in town, swinging it about—­only carried it hidden against his thigh.