Olav saw the bird as a dot against the sky—it sat on a fir twig against the yellowing northern heaven. He could see how it drew itself in and swelled itself out, like a little heart beating. The hosts of cloud high up began to flush, a flush spread over the hillside with a rosy reflection in the water.—Olav knocked at the door again, much harder—it rang out in the morning stillness so that the boy held his breath and listened for a movement in any of the houses.

Soon after, the door was opened ajar—the girl slipped out. Her hair hung about her, ruffled and lustreless; it was yellow-brown and very curly. She was in her bare smock; the neck, which was of white linen, was worked with green and blue flowers, but below, it was of coarse grey stuff, and it was too long for her and trailed about her narrow pink feet. She carried her clothes over her arm and had a wallet in her hand. This she gave to Olav, threw down her bundle of clothes, and shook her hair from her face, which was still flushed with sleep—one cheek redder than the other. She took a waist-band and girt up her smock with it.

She was tall and thin, with slight limbs, a long, slender throat, and a small head. Her face was a triangle, her forehead low and broad, but it was snow-white and finely arched at the temples under the thick folds of hair; the thin cheeks were too much drawn in, making the chin too long and pointed; the straight little nose was too low and short. But for all that her little face had a restless charm of its own: the eyes were very large and dark grey, but the whites were as blue as a little child’s, and they lay in deep shadow beneath the straight black lines of her brows and her full, white eyelids; the mouth was narrow, but the lips were red as berries—and with her bright pink and white complexion Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter was fair now in her young girlhood.

“Make haste,” said Olav, as she sat on the stair winding her linen hose tightly around her legs; and she took good time about it. “You were best carry hose and shoes till the grass be dry.”

“I will not go barefoot on the wet ground in this cold—” the girl shivered a little.

“You will be warmer when once you have made an end of putting on your clothes—you must not be so long about it—’tis rosy morning already, cannot you see?”

Ingunn made no answer, but took off her hose-band and began again to wind it about her leg. Olav hung her clothes over the rail of the balcony.

“You must have a cloak with you—do you not see we shall have showers today?”

“My cloak is down with Mother—I forgot to take it with me last night. It looks now like fine weather—but if there comes a shower, we shall find some place to creep under.”

“What if it rains while we are in the boat? You cannot walk in the town without a cloak either. But I see well enough you will borrow my cloak, as is your way.”

Ingunn looked up at him over her shoulder. “Why are you so cross today, Olav?”—and she began to be busy with her footgear again.

Olav was ready with an answer; but as she bent down to her shoe, the smock slipped from her shoulders, baring her bosom and upper arm. And instantly a wave of new feelings swept over the boy—he stood still, bashful and confused, and could not take his eyes off this glimpse of her naked body. It was as though he had never seen it before; a new light was thrown on what he knew of old—as with a sudden landslip within him, his feelings for his foster-sister came to rest in a new order. With a burst of fervour he felt a tenderness that had in it both pity and a touch of pride; her shoulders sank so weakly in a slant to the faint rounding of the shoulder-joint; the thin, white upper arms looked soft, as though she had no muscles under the silky skin—the boy’s senses were tricked with a vision of corn that is as yet but milky, before it has fully ripened. He had a mind to stoop down and pat her consolingly—such was his sudden sense of the difference between her feeble softness and his own wiry, muscular body. Oft had he looked at her before, in the bath-house, and at himself, his hard, tough, well-rounded chest, his muscles firmly braced over the stomach, and swelling into a knot as he bent his arm. With childish pride he had rejoiced that he was a boy.

Now this self-glorious sense of being strong and well made became strangely shot through with tenderness, because she was so weak—he would know how to protect her. He would gladly have put his arm around that slender back, clasped her little girlish breasts beneath his hand. He called to mind that day last spring when he himself had fallen on his chest over a log—it was where Gunleik’s new house was building—he had torn both his clothes and his flesh. With a shudder in which were mingled horror and sweetness he thought that never more would he let Ingunn climb up on the roof with them at Gunleik’s farm.

He blushed as she looked at him.

“You are staring? Mother will never know I have borrowed her smock; she never wears it herself.”

“Do you not feel the cold?” he asked; and Ingunn’s surprise was yet greater, for he spoke as low and shyly as though she had really come to some hurt in their game.

“Oh, not enough to make my nails go blue,” she said laughing.

“No, but can you not get your clothes on quickly?” he said anxiously. “You have goose-flesh on your arms.”

“If I could but get my smock together—” The edges at the throat were stiff with sewing; she struggled, but could not get the stuff through the tiny ring of her brooch.

Olav laid down the whole load that he had just taken on his back. “I will lend you mine—it has a bigger ring.” He took the gold brooch from his bosom and handed it to her. Ingunn looked at him, amazed. She had pestered him to lend her this trinket before now, but that he himself should offer to let her wear it was something new, for it was a costly jewel, of pure gold and fairly big. Along the outer edge were inscribed the Angel’s Greeting and Amor vincit omnia. Her kinsman Arnvid Finnsson said that in the Norse tongue this meant “Love conquers all things,” since the Lady Sancta Maria conquers all the malice of the fiend by her loving supplication.

Ingunn had put on her red holy-day garments and bound her silken girdle about her waist—she combed her tangled hair with her fingers.

“You must even lend me your comb, Olav!”

Although he had but just collected all his things again, he laid them down once more, searched out a comb from his pouch, and gave it to her without impatience.

But as they plodded along the road between the fences down in the village, Olav’s dizzy exaltation forsook him little by little.