“You?” asked Isak.  It slipped out.

Oline answered humbly:  “Ay, since ’twas my modest doing that she ever went away.”

Isak was speechless at that; all his words were checked, he sat there staring.  Had he heard aright?  Oline sat there looking as if she had said nothing.  No, in a battle of words Isak was altogether lost.

He swung out of the house, full of dark thoughts.  Oline, that beast that throve in wickedness and grew fat on it—­why had he not wrung her neck the first year?  So he thought, trying to pull himself together.  He could have done it—­he?  Couldn’t he, though!  No one better.

And then a ridiculous thing happened.  Isak went into the shed and counted the goats.  There they are with their kids, the full number.  He counts the cows, the pig, fourteen hens, two calves.  “I’d all but forgotten the sheep,” he says to himself; he counts the sheep, and pretends to be all anxiety lest there should be any missing there.  Isak knows very well that there is a sheep missing; he has known that a long time; why should he let it appear otherwise?  It was this way.  Oline had tricked him nicely once before, saying one of the goats was gone, though all the goats were there as they should be; he had made a great fuss about it at the time, but to no purpose.  It was always the same when he came into conflict with Oline.  Then, in the autumn, at slaughtering time, he had seen at once that there was one ewe short, but he had not found courage to call her to account for it at the time.  And he had not found that courage since.

But today he is stern; Isak is stern.  Oline has made him thoroughly angry this time.  He counts the sheep over again, putting his forefinger on each and counting aloud—­Oline may hear it if she likes, if she should happen to be outside.  And he says many hard things about Oline—­says them out loud; how that she uses a new method of her own in feeding sheep, a method that simply makes them vanish—­here’s a ewe simply vanished.  She is a thieving baggage, nothing less, and she may know it!  Oh, he would just have liked Oline to be standing outside and hear it, and be thoroughly frightened for once.

He strides out from the shed, goes to the stable and counts the horse; from there he will go in—­will go into the house and speak his mind.  He walks so fast that his shirt stands out like a very angry shirt behind him.  But Oline as like as not has noticed something, looking out through the glass window; she appears in the doorway, quietly and steadily, with buckets in her hands, on her way to the cowshed.

“What have you done with that ewe with the flat ears?” he asks.

“Ewe?” she asks.

“Ay.  If she’d been here she’d have had two lambs by now.  What have you done with them?  She always had two.  You’ve done me out of three together, do you understand?”

Oline is altogether overwhelmed, altogether annihilated by the accusation; she wags her head, and her legs seem to melt away under her—­she might fall and hurt herself.  Her head is busy all the time; her ready wit had always helped her, always served her well; it must not fail her now.