Then Isak carried his corn to the mill and had it ground, and brought back flour.  Then he turned woodman again, cutting the wood to be ready for next winter.  His life was spent in this work and that, according to the season; from the fields to the woods, and back to the fields again.  He had worked on the place for six years now, and Inger five; all might have been well, if it were only allowed to last.  But it was not.  Inger worked at her loom and tended the animals; also, she was often to be heard singing hymns, but it was a pitiful singing; she was like a bell without a tongue.

As soon as the roads were passable, she was sent for down to the village to be examined.  Isak had to stay behind.  And being there all alone, it came into his mind to go across to Sweden and find out Geissler; the former Lensmand had been kind to them, and might perhaps still lend a helping hand some way to the folks at Sellanraa.  But when Inger returned, she had asked about things herself, and learned something of what her sentence was likely to be.  Strictly speaking, it was imprisonment for life, Paragraph I. But ...  After all, she had stood up in the court itself and simply confessed.  The two witnesses from the village had looked pityingly at her, and the judge had put his questions kindly; but for all that, she was no match for the bright intellects of the law.  Lawyers are great men to simple folk; they can quote paragraph this and section that; they have learned such things by rote, ready to bring out at any moment.  Oh, they are great men indeed.  And apart from all this knowledge, they are not always devoid of sense; sometimes even not altogether heartless.  Inger had no cause to complain of the court; she made no mention of the hare, but when she tearfully explained that she could not be so cruel to her poor deformed child as to let it live, the magistrate nodded, quietly and seriously.

“But,” said he, “think of yourself; you have a hare-lip, and it has not spoilt your life.”

“No, thanks be to God,” was all she said.  She could not tell them of all she had suffered in secret as a child, as a young girl.

But the magistrate must have understood something of what it meant; he himself had a club-foot, and could not dance.  “As to the sentence,” he said, “I hardly know.  Really, it should be imprisonment for life, but ...  I can’t say, perhaps we might get it commuted, second or third degree, fifteen to twelve years, or twelve to nine.  There’s a commission sitting to reform the criminal code, make it more humane, but the final decision won’t be ready yet.  Anyhow, we must hope for the best,” said he.

Inger came back in a state of dull resignation; they had not found it necessary to keep her in confinement meantime.  Two months passed; then one evening, when Isak came back from fishing, the Lensmand and his new assistant had been to Sellanraa.

Inger was cheerful, and welcomed her husband kindly, praising his catch, though it was little he had brought home.