Said Oline:  “As for that, I’ll wear out my pattens in time, no doubt.  I’d no thought there was any such haste to wear out good pattens all at once.”  She spake softly and gently, but with half-closed eyes, the same sly Oline as ever.  “And as for Inger,” said she, “the changeling, as we called her, she went about with children of mine and learned both this and that, for years she did.  And this is what we get for it.  Because I’ve a daughter that lives in Bergen and wears a hat, I suppose that’s what Inger must be gone away south for; gone to Trondhjem to buy a hat, he he!”

Isak got up to leave the room.  But Oline had opened her heart now, unlocked the store of blackness within; ay, she gave out rays of darkness, did Oline.  Thank Heaven, none of her children had their faces slit like a fire-breathing dragon, so to speak; but they were none the worse for that, maybe.  No, ’twasn’t every one was so quick and handy at getting rid of the young they bore—­strangling them in a twinkling....

“Mind what you’re saying,” shouted Isak.  And to make his meaning perfectly clear, he added:  “You cursed old hag!”

But Oline was not going to mind what she was saying; not in the least, he he!  She turned up her eyes to heaven and hinted that a hare-lip might be this or that, but some folk seemed to carry it too far, he he!

Isak may well have been glad to get safely out of the house at last.  And what could he do but get Oline the shoes?  A tiller of earth in the wilds; no longer even something of a god, that he could say to his servant, “Go!” He was helpless without Oline; whatever she did or said, she had nothing to fear, and she knew it.

The nights are colder now, with a full moon; the marshlands harden till they can almost bear, but thawing again when the sun comes out, to an impassable swamp once more.  Isak goes down to the village one cold night, to order shoes for Oline.  He takes a couple of cheeses with him, for Fru Geissler.

Half-way down to the village a new settler has appeared.  A well-to-do man, no doubt, since he had called in folk from the village to build his house, and hired men to plough up a patch of sandy moorland for potatoes; he himself did little or nothing.  The new man was Brede Olsen, Lensmand’s assistant, a man to go to when the doctor had to be fetched, or a pig to be killed.  He was not yet thirty, but had four children to look after, not to speak of his wife, who was as good as a child herself.  Oh, Brede was not so well off, perhaps, after all; ’twas no great money he could earn running hither and thither on all odd businesses, and collecting taxes from people that would not pay.  So now he was trying a new venture on the soil.  He had raised a loan at the bank to start house in the wilds.  Breidablik, he called the place; and it was Lensmand Heyerdahl’s lady that had found that splendid name.