Toenne worked, glowing with eagerness, certain that Jofrid would understand his meaning, if only the house were ready.  He did not wonder much about her; he had enough to do to hew and shape.  The days went quickly for him.

One afternoon, when Jofrid came over the moor, she saw that there was a door in the cottage and a slab of stone for a threshold.  Then she understood that everything must now be ready, and she was much agitated.  Toenne had covered the roof with tufts of flowering heather, and she was seized by an intense longing to enter under that red roof.  He was not at the new house and she decided to go in.  The house was built for her.  It was her home.  It was not possible to resist the desire to see it.

Within it was more attractive than she had expected.  Rushes were strewed over the floor.  It was full of the fresh fragrance of pine and resin.  The sunshine that played through the windows and cracks made bands of light through the air.  It looked as if she had been expected; in the crannies of the wall green branches were stuck, and in the fireplace stood a newly cut fir-tree.  Toenne had not moved in his old furniture.  There was nothing but a new table and a bench, over which an elk skin was thrown.

As soon as Jofrid had crossed the threshold, she felt the pleasant cosiness of home surrounding her.  She was happy and content while she stood there, but to leave it seemed to her as hard as to go away and serve strangers.  It happened that Jofrid had expended much hard work in procuring a kind of dower for herself.  With skilful hands she had woven bright colored fabrics, such as are used to adorn a room, and she wanted to put them up in her own home, when she got one.  Now she wondered how those cloths would look here.  She wished she could try them in the new house.

She hurried quickly home, fetched her roll of weavings and began to fasten the bright-colored pieces of cloth up under the roof.  She threw open the door to let the big setting sun shine on her and her work.  She moved eagerly about the cottage, brisk, gay, bumming a merry tune.  She was perfectly happy.  It looked so fine.  The woven roses and stars shone as never before.

While she worked she kept a good look-out over the moor and the graves, for it seemed to her as if Toenne might now too be lying hidden behind one of the cairns and laughing at her.  The king’s grave lay opposite the door and behind it she saw the sun setting.  Time after time she looked out.  She felt as if some one was sitting there and watching her.

Just as the sun was so low that only a few blood-red beams filtered over the old stone heap, she saw who it was who was watching her.  The whole pile of stones was no longer stones, but a mighty, old warrior, who was sitting there, scarred and gray, and staring at her.  Round about his head the rays of the sun made a crown, and his red mantle was so wide that it spread over the whole moor.  His head was big and heavy, his face gray as stone.  His clothes and weapons were also stone-colored, and repeated so exactly the shadings and mossiness of the rock, that one had to look closely to see that it was a warrior and not a pile of stones.  It was like those insects which resemble tree-twigs.  One can go by them twenty times before one sees that it is a soft animal body one has taken for hard wood.