Then Gertrude recalled to memory what she had heard folks say of Pete:  “Any one wanting to injure an enemy without risking discovery could avail himself of his services.”  He was suspected of having started a number of incendiary fires at the instigation of others.

Gertrude then went up to the man and asked him, half in fun, if he wouldn’t like to set fire to the Ingmar Farm.  She wished it done, she said, because Ingmar Ingmarsson thought more of the farm than of her.

To her horror, the half-witted dwarf was ready to act on her suggestion.  Nodding gleefully, he started on a run toward the settlement.  She hurried after, but could not seem to overtake him.  Her dress caught in the brushwood, her feet sank in the marsh, and she stumbled over stony ground.  When she was almost out of the forest, what should she see through the trees but the glow from a fire.  “He has done it, he has set fire to the farm!” she shrieked, again awakening from the horror of the dream.

Now Gertrude sat up in bed; tears ran down her cheeks.  She dared not sink back on her pillow again for fear of dreaming further.  “Oh, Lord help me, Lord help me!” she cried.  “I don’t know how much evil there may be hidden in my heart, but God knows that never once during all this time have I thought of revenging myself on Ingmar.  O God, let me not fall into this sin!” she prayed.  Wringing her hands in an agony of despair, she cried out: 

“Grief is a menace, grief is a menace, grief is a menace!”

It was not very clear to her just what she meant by that; but she felt somehow that her poor heart was like a ravaged garden, in which all the flowers had been uprooted, and now Grief, as a gardener, moved about in there, planting thistles and poisonous herbs.

The whole forenoon of the following day, Gertrude thought that she was still dreaming.  Her dream had seemed so real that she could not get it out of her mind.  Remembering with what satisfaction she had plunged the needle into Ingmar’s eyes, she shuddered.  “How dreadful that I should have become so cruel and resentful!  What shall I do to rid myself of this?  I’m really getting to be a very wicked person!”

After dinner Gertrude went out to milk the cows.  She drew her kerchief down over her face, as usual, and kept her eyes on the ground.  Walking along the narrow paths where she had wandered in the dream, even the flowers by the wayside looked the same as in the dream.  In her strange state of semi-wakefulness, she could hardly distinguish between what she actually saw and what she only seemed to see in fancy.

When she reached the pasturage, there were no cows to be seen.  And she began to search for them, as she had done in the dream—­looking down by the brook, under the birches, and behind the brushwood.  She could not find them, yet she felt quite certain that they must be thereabout, and that she would probably see them were she only wide awake.  Presently she came upon an opening in the hedge, and knew at once that the cows had made their escape through this.