Thus did Dagson drive the people through flame and smoke and desolation.  They had fire in front of them, fire behind them, and fire to left and right of them, and saw only destruction ahead of them.  Yet, after taking them through all these horrors, he finally led them to a green spot in the forest, where it was peaceful and cool and safe.  In the centre of a flowery meadow sat Jesus, with His arms outstretched toward the fleeing and hunted men and women who cast themselves at His feet.  Now all danger was past, and they suffered no further distress nor persecution.

Dagson spoke as he himself felt.  If he could only lay himself down at Jesus’ feet, a sense of great peace and serenity would come to him, and he had no more fear of the snares of the world.

After the service there was great emotional excitement.  Many persons rushed up to the speaker and thanked him, with tears streaming down their faces.  They told him that his words had awakened them to a true faith in God.  But all this time Karin sat unmoved.  When Dagson had finished speaking, she raised her heavy eyelids and looked up at him, as if reproaching him for not having given her anything.  Just then some one outside cried in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire congregation: 

“Woe, woe, woe to those who give stones for bread!  Woe, woe, woe to those who give stones for bread!”

Whereupon everybody rushed out, curious to see who it was that had spoken those words, and Karin was left sitting there in her helplessness.  Presently members of her own household came back, and told her that the person who had cried out like that was a tall, dark stranger.  He and a pretty, fair-haired woman had been seen coming down the road, in a cart, during the service.  They had stopped to listen, and just as they were about to drive on, the man had risen up and spoken.  Some folks thought they knew the woman.  They said she was one of Strong Ingmar’s daughters—­one of those who had gone to America and married there.  The man was evidently her husband.  Of course it is not so easy to recognize a person whom one has known as a young girl in the ordinary peasant costume, when she comes back a grown woman dressed up in city clothes.

Karin and the stranger were evidently of the same mind regarding Dagson.  Karin never went to the mission house again.  But later in the summer, when a Baptist layman came to the parish, baptizing and exhorting, she went to hear him, and when the Salvation Army began to hold meetings in the village, she also attended one of these.

The parish was in the throes of a great religious upheaval.  At all the meetings there were awakenings and conversions.  The people seemed to find what they had been seeking.  Yet among all those whom Karin had heard preach, not one could give her any consolation.

***

A blacksmith named Birger Larsson had a smithy close by the highroad.  His shop was small and dark, with a low door, and an aperture in place of a window.  Birger Larsson made common knives, mended locks, put tires on wheels and on sled runners.  When there was nothing else to be done, he forged nails.