That evening Barbro seems not to care for her food, but goes about, all the same, busy with this and that—­goes to the cowshed at milking-time, only stepping a thought more carefully over the door-sill.  She went to bed in the hayshed as usual.  Axel went in twice to look at her, and she was sleeping soundly.  She had a good night.

Next morning she was almost as usual, only so hoarse she could hardly speak at all, and with a long stocking wound round her throat.  They could not talk together.  Days passed, and the matter was no longer new; other things cropped up, and it slipped aside.  The new house ought by rights to have been left a while for the timber to work together and make it tight and sound, but there was no time for that now; they had to get it into use at once, and the new cowshed ready.  When it was done, and they had moved in, they took up the potatoes, and after that there was the corn to get in.  Life was the same as ever.

But there were signs enough, great or small, that things were different now at Maaneland.  Barbro felt herself no more at home there now than any other serving-maid; no more bound to the place.  Axel could see that his hold on her had loosened with the death of the child.  He had thought to himself so confidently:  wait till the child comes!  But the child had come and gone.  And at last Barbro even took off the rings from her fingers, and wore neither.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“What’s it mean?” she said, tossing her head.

But it could hardly mean anything else than faithlessness and desertion on her part.

And he had found the little body by the stream.  Not that he had made any search for it, to speak of; he knew pretty closely where it must be, but he had left the matter idly as it was.  Then chance willed it so that he should not forget it altogether; birds began to hover above the spot, shrieking grouse and crows, and then, later on, a pair of eagles at a giddy height above.  To begin with, only a single bird had seen something buried there, and, being unable to keep a secret like a human being, had shouted it abroad.  Then Axel roused himself from his apathy, and waited for an opportunity to steal out to the spot.  He found the thing under a heap of moss and twigs, kept down by flat stones, and wrapped in a cloth, in a piece of rag.  With a feeling of curiosity and horror he drew the cloth a little aside—­eyes closed, dark hair, a boy, and the legs crossed—­that was all he saw.  The cloth had been wet, but was drying now; the whole thing looked like a half-wrung bundle of washing.