One day Toenne took Jofrid to one of the clefts, where he had hidden his timber.  He pulled aside the branches and moss and showed her the squared beams.  “That was to have been mother’s house,” he said.  The young girl was strangely slow in understanding a young man’s thoughts.  When he showed her his mother’s logs she ought to have understood, but she did not understand.

Then he decided to make his meaning even plainer.  A few days later he began to drag the logs up to the place between the cairns, where he had seen Jofrid for the first time.  She came as usual along the path and saw him at work.  Nevertheless she went on without saying anything.  Since they had become friends she had often given him a good handshake, but she did not seem to want to help him with the heavy work.  Toenne still thought that she ought to have understood that it was now her house which he meant to build.

She understood it very well, but she had no desire to give herself to such a man as Toenne.  She wished to have a strong and healthy husband.  She thought it would be a poor livelihood to marry any one who was weak and dull.  Still, there was much which drew her to that silent, shy man.  She thought how hard he had worked to gladden his mother and had not enjoyed the happiness of being ready in time.  She could weep for his sake.  And now he was building the house just where he had seen her dance.  He had a good heart.  And that interested her and fixed her thoughts on him, but she did not at all wish to marry him.

Every day she went over the heather field and saw the log cabin grow, miserable and without windows, with the sunlight filtering in through the leaky walls.

Toenne’s work progressed very quickly, but not with care.  His timbers were not bent square, the lark was scarcely taken off.  He laid the floor with split young trees.  It was uneven and shaky.  The heather, which grew and blossomed under it,—­for at year had passed since the day when Toenne had lain aleep behind King Atle’s pile,—­ pushed up bold red clusters through the cracks, and ants without number wandered out and in, inspecting the fragile work of man.

Wherever Jofrid went during those days, the thought never left her that a house was being built for her there.  A home was being prepared for her upon the heath.  And she knew that if she did not enter there as mistress, the bear and the fox would make it their home.  For she knew Toenne well enough to understand that if he found he had worked in vain, he would never move into the new house.  He would weep, poor man, when he heard that she would not live there.  It would be a new sorrow for him, as deep as when his mother died.  But he had himself to blame, because he had not asked her in time.

She thought that she gave him a sufficient hint in not helping him with the house.  She often felt impelled to do so.  Every time she saw any soft, white moss, she wanted to pick it to fill in the leaky walls.  She longed, too, to help Toenne to build the chimney.  As he was making it, all the smoke would gather in the house.  But it did not matter how it was.  No food would ever be cooked there, no ale brewed.  Still it was odious that the house would never leave her thoughts.