When she had been carried up to the gate of the graveyard, she left her bearers and walked alone up the broad middle path.  Her gaze wandered round the flowering spot, but she saw no one.

Suddenly she heard a faint rustle in a clump of fir-trees, and she saw a wild, distorted face staring from it.  Never had she seen terror so plainly stamped on a face.  She was frightened herself at the sight of it, mortally frightened.  She could hardly restrain herself from running away.

Then a great, holy feeling welled up in her.  There was no longer any thought of love or enthusiasm, but only grief that a fellow-being, one of the unhappy ones who passed through the vale of tears with her, should be destroyed.

The girl remained.  She did not give way a single step; she let him slowly accustom himself to the sight of her.  But she put all the strength she possessed in her gaze.  She drew the man to her with the whole force of the will that had conquered the illness in herself.

He came forward out of his corner, pale, wild and unkempt.  He advanced towards her, but the terror never left his face.  He looked as if he were fascinated by a wild beast, which came to tear him to pieces.  When he was quite close to her, she put both her hands on his shoulders and looked smiling into his face.

“Come, Petter Nord, what is the matter with you?  You must go from here!  What do you mean by staying so long up here in the graveyard, Petter Nord?”

He trembled and sank down.  But she felt that she subdued him with her eyes.  Her words, on the other hand, seemed to have absolutely no meaning to him.

She changed her tone a little.  “Listen to what I say, Petter Nord.  I am not dead.  I am not going to die.  I have got well in order to come up here and save you.”

He still stood in the same dull terror.  Again there came a change in her voice.  “You have not caused my death,” she said more tenderly, “you have given me life.”

She repeated it again and again.  And her voice at last was trembling with emotion, thick with weeping.  But he did not understand anything of what she said.

“Petter Nord, I love you so much, so much!” she burst out.

He was just as unmoved.

She knew nothing more to try with him.  She would have to take him down with her to the town and let time and care help.

It is not easy to say what the dreams she had taken up there with her were and what she had expected from this meeting with the man who loved her.  Now, when she was to give it all up and treat him as a madman only, she felt such pain, as if she was about to lose the dearest thing life had given her.  And in that bitterness of loss she drew him to her and kissed him on the forehead.

It was meant as a farewell to both happiness and life.  She felt her strength fail her.  A mortal weakness came over her.

But then she thought she saw a feeble sign of life in him.  He was not quite so limp and dull.  His features were twitching.  He trembled more and more violently.  She watched with ever-growing alarm.  He was waking, but to what?  At last he began to weep.