In this misery Karin passed a winter and a summer and another winter.

But Karin had a retreat to which she would flee at times in order to be alone with her thoughts.  Behind the hop garden there was a narrow seat upon which she often sat, with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting in her hands, staring straight ahead, yet seeing nothing.  Fronting her were great stretches of cornfields, beyond which was the forest, and in the distance the range of hills and Mount Klack.

One evening in April she sat on her bench, feeling tired and listless, as one often does in the springtime when the snow turns to slush and the ground is still unwashed by spring rains.  The hops lay sleeping under a cover of fir brush.  Over against the hills hung a thick mist, such as always accompanies a thaw.  The birch tops were beginning to turn brown, but all along the skirt of the forest there was still a deep border of snow.  Spring would soon be there in earnest, and the thought of it made her feel even more tired.  She felt that she could never live through another summer like the last one.  She thought of all the work ahead of her—­sowing and haymaking; spring baking and spring cleaning; weaving and sewing—­and wondered how she would ever get through with it all.

“I might better be dead,” she sighed.  “I seem to be here for no other purpose than to prevent Elof killing himself with drink.”

Suddenly she looked up, as if she had heard some one calling her.  Leaning against the hedge, looking straight at her, stood Halvor Halvorsson.  She did not know just when he had come, but apparently he had been standing there a good while.

“I thought I should find you over here,” Halvor said.

“Oh, did you?”

“I remembered how in days gone by you used to step away, and come here to sit and brood.”

“I didn’t have much to brood over at that time.”

“Then your troubles were mostly imaginary.”

Karin mused as she looked at Halvor:  “He must be thinking what a fool I was not to have married him, who is such a handsome and dignified man.  Now he’s got me where he can crow over me, and he has come only to laugh at me.”

“I’ve been inside talking with Elof,” Halvor enlightened.  “It was really him I wanted to see.”

Karin made no reply, but sat there, frigid and unresponsive, her eyes fixed on the ground and her hands crossed, prepared to meet all the scorn she fancied Halvor would now heap upon her.

“I said to him,” Halvor continued, “that I considered myself largely to blame for his misfortune, since it was at my place that he got hurt.”  He paused a moment, as if waiting for some expression from her, either of approval or disapproval.  But Karin was silent.  “So I have asked him to come and live with me for a while.  It would at least be a change, and he could see more people than he meets here.”

Then Karin raised her eyes, but otherwise remained as motionless as before.