’Then, if we were in Norway and this a considerable farmhouse, we should have passed through an ante-room filled with all sorts of things.  Meal chests, and tools, and thongs of leather, skins of animals and wild birds, snow shoes and casks and little sledges.  Do you know,’ he went on, ’if this were not the land of my father, I could find it in my heart to go and live in the land of my mother.  It is a noble land, and it is a fine people.  Feudal law never obtained footing there; every landholder held under no superior; and so there is a manly, genial independence in all the country-side, not found everywhere else.’

He went on for some little time to give Wych Hazel pictures of the scenery, unlike all she had ever known.  He knew and loved it well, and his sketches were given graphically.  In the midst of this Gyda came in again; and Rollo broke off, and asked her, laughingly, if she had any ‘fladbrod.’

‘Fresh,’ she said.  ‘Olaf, can’t you get her some peaches?’

Rollo went off; and the old woman began to set her table with bowls and plates and spoons; an oddly carved little tub of butter, and a pile of thin brown cakes.  Having done this, and Rollo not returning, on the contrary seeming to have found more than peach trees to detain him, for the sound of hammer was heard at intervals, the old woman came and stood by Wych Hazel again.  The straw hat was off; and she eyed in a tender kind of way, wistful too, the fair young face.

‘Dear,’ she said, in that same wistful way, laying her hand on the girl’s shoulder, ‘does he love you?’

Hazel started in extreme surprise; looking up with wide-open eyes; and more pale than red in her first astonishment.

‘He? me?—­No!’ she said, as the blood came surging back.  But then recollections came too, and possibilities—­and eyes and head both drooped.  And with the inevitable instinct of truth the girl added, under her breath—­

‘Perhaps—­how do I know?  I cannot tell!’

By that time head and hands too were on the back of her chair, and she had turned from Gyda, and her face was out of sight.  With a tender little smile, which she could not see, the old Norse woman stood beside her, and with tender fingers which she did feel, smoothed and stroked the hair on each side of her head.  For a few minutes.

‘And, dear,’ she said presently, in the same soft way, ’do you love him?’

There are questions, confusing enough when merely propounded by ourselves, in the solitude of our hearts; but which when coming first from the lips of another, before they have been fairly recognized as questions, become simply unbearable.  Hazel shrank away from the words, gentle as they were, with one of her quick gestures.

‘I do not know,’ she cried.  ’I have never thought!  I have no business to know!’

And lifting her head for a moment, with eyes all grave and troubled and almost tearful, she looked into the face of the old Norwegian, mutely beseeching her to be merciful, and not push her advantage any further.