“What’s wrong with it, then?”

“Wrong with it?  There’s nothing wrong with it that I know,” she answered, and got up to clear the table.

“Why, you’ll needs make do with it for now,” he said.  “Maybe I’ll manage another some day.”

Barbro made no answer.

A thankless creature was Barbro this evening.  A new silver ring—­she might at least have thanked him nicely for it.  It must be that clerk with the town ways that had turned her head.  Axel could not help saying:  “I’d like to know what that fellow Eleseus keeps coming here for, anyway.  What does he want with you?”

“With me?”

“Ay.  Is he such a greenhorn and can’t see how ’tis with you now?  Hasn’t he eyes in his head?”

Barbro turned on him straight at that:  “Oh, so you think you’ve got a hold on me because of that?  You’ll find out you’re wrong, that’s all.”

“Ho!” said Axel.

“Ay, and I’ll not stay here, neither.”

But Axel only smiled a little at this; not broadly and laughing in her face, no; for he did not mean to cross her.  And then he spoke soothingly, as to a child:  “Be a good girl now, Barbro.  ’Tis you and me, you know.”

And of course in the end Barbro gave in and was good, and even went to sleep with the silver ring on her finger.

It would all come right in time, never fear.

For the two in the hut, yes.  But what about Eleseus?  ’Twas worse with him; he found it hard to get over the shameful way Barbro had treated him.  He knew nothing of hysterics, and took it as all pure cruelty on her part; that girl Barbro from Breidablik thought a deal too much of herself, even though she had been in Bergen....

He sent her back the photograph in a way of his own—­took it down himself one night and stuck it through the door to her in the hayloft, where she slept.  ’Twas not done in any rough unmannerly way, not at all; he had fidgeted with the door a long time so as to wake her, and when she rose up on her elbow and asked, “What’s the matter; can’t you find your way in this evening?” he understood the question was meant for some one else, and it went through him like a needle; like a sabre.

He walked back home—­no walking-stick, no whistling.  He did not care about playing the man any longer.  A stab at the heart is no light matter.

And was that the last of it?

One Sunday he went down just to look; to peep and spy.  With a sickly and unnatural patience he lay in hiding among the bushes, staring over at the hut.  And when at last there came a sign of life and movement it was enough to make an end of him altogether:  Axel and Barbro came out together and went across to the cowshed.  They were loving and affectionate now, ay, they had a blessed hour; they walked with their arms round each other, and he was going to help her with the animals.  Ho, yes!

Eleseus watched the pair with a look as if he had lost all; as a ruined man.  And his thought, maybe, was like this:  There she goes arm in arm with Axel Stroem.  How she could ever do it I can’t think; there was a time when she put her arms round me!  And there they disappeared into the shed.