Late one evening Jofrid and Toenne came home from the festivities.  They went straight to bed.  But hardly had they fallen asleep before they were waked by a feeble crying.  “It is the child,” they thought, still half asleep, and were angry at being disturbed.  But suddenly both of them sat right up in the bed.  The child was dead.  Where did that crying come from?  When they were quite awake, they heard nothing, but as soon as they began to drop off to sleep they heard it.  Little, tottering feet sounded on the stone threshold outside the house, a little hand groped for the door, and when it could not open it, the child crept crying and feeling along the wall, until it stopped just outside where they were sleeping.  As soon as they spoke or sat up, they perceived nothing; but when they tried to sleep, they distinctly heard the uncertain steps and the suppressed sobbings.

That which they had not wished to believe, but which seemed a possibility during these last days, now became a certainty.  They felt that they had killed the child.  Why otherwise should it have the power to haunt them?

From that night all happiness left them.  They lived in constant fear of the ghost.  By day they had some peace, but at night they were so disturbed by the child’s weeping and choking sobs, that they did not dare to sleep alone.  Jofrid often went long distances to get some one to stop over night in their house.  If there was any stranger there, it was quiet, but as soon as they were alone, they heard the child.

One night, when they had found no one to keep them company and could not sleep for the child, Jofrid got up from her bed.

“You sleep, Toenne,” she said.  “If I keep awake, we will not hear anything.”

She went out and sat down on the doorstep, thinking of what they ought to do to get peace, for they could not go on living as things were.  She wondered if confession and penance and mortification and repentance could relieve them from this heavy punishment.

Then it happened that she raised her eyes and saw the same vision as once before from this place.  The pile of stones had changed to a warrior.  The night was quite dark, but still she could plainly see that old King Atle sat there and watched her.  She saw him so well that she could distinguish the moss-grown bracelets on his wrists and could see how his legs were bound with crossed bands, between which his calf muscles swelled.

This time she was not afraid of the old man.  He seemed to be a friend and consoler in her unhappiness.  He looked at her with pity, as if he wished to give her courage.  Then she thought that the mighty warrior had once had his day, when he had overthrown hundreds of enemies there on the heath and waded through the streams of blood that had poured between the clumps.  What had he thought of one dead man more or less?  How much would the sight of children, whose fathers he had killed, have moved his heart of stone?  Light as air would the burden of a child’s death have rested on his conscience.