When she had said that about bathing, an ugly thought had come over him—together with a meaningless fear, strong as the fear of death; for it seemed to him that they were as two trees, torn up by the spring flood and adrift on a stream—and he was afraid the stream would part them asunder. At that fiery moment he seemed to have full knowledge of what it meant to possess her and what to lose her.

But what was the sense of thinking of such things, when all who had power and authority over them had ordained that they should be joined together? There was no man and no thing to part them. None the less, with a tremor of anxiety he felt his childish security shrivel up and vanish, the certainty that all the future days of his life were threaded for him like beads upon a string. He could not banish the thought that if Ingunn were taken from him, he knew nothing of the future. Somewhere deep down within him murmured the voice of a tempter: he must secure her, as the rude and simple serving-men secured the coarse womenfolk they had a mind to—and if anyone stretched out a hand toward her that was his, he would be wild, like the he-wolf showing his teeth as he stands over his prey; like the stallion rearing and snorting with rage to receive the bear and fight to the death for his mares, while they stand in a ring about the scared and quivering foals.

The boy lay motionless, staring himself dizzy and hot at the play of light in the gliding water, while he strove with these new thoughts—both what he knew and what he dimly guessed. When Ingunn gave a call just behind him, he started up as though waked from sleep.

“You were foolish not to care for a swim,” she said.

“Come now!” Olav jumped down to the beach and walked quickly before her. “We have stayed here far too long.”

After rowing awhile he grew calmer. It felt good to swing his body in steady strokes. The beat of the oars in the rowlocks, the wash of the water under the boat, lulled his agitation.

It was broiling hot now and the light from the sky and lake dazzled and hurt the eyes—the shores were bathed in heat haze. And when Olav had rowed for wellnigh two hours, it began to tell on him severely. The boat was heavy, and he had not thought how unpractised he was at rowing. This was not the same as poling and splashing about the tarn at home. He had to keep far out, for the shore wound in bays and inlets; at times he was afraid he might be clean out of his course. The town might lie hidden behind one of these headlands, invisible from the boat—perhaps he had already passed it. Olav saw now that he was in strange country; he remembered nothing from his last journey in these parts.

The sun burned his back; the palms of his hands were sore; and his legs were asleep, so long had he sat with his feet against the stretcher. But the back of his neck ached worst of all. The lake gleamed far around the tiny boat—it was a long way to land on every side. Now and again he felt he was rowing against a current. And there was scarce a craft to be seen that day, whether far out or close under the shore. Olav toiled at the oars, glum and morose, fearing he would never reach the town.

Ingunn sat in the stern of the boat facing the sun, so that her red kirtle was ablaze; her face under the shade of her velvet hood was flushed with the reflection. She had thrown Olav’s cloak about her, for the air on the water was chill to her, sitting still, she said; and then she had drawn the hood down to shade her eyes. It was a fine cloak of grey-green Flanders cloth with a cowl of black velvet—one of the things Olav had had from Hestviken. Ingunn had a well-dressed look in all the ample folds of her garments. She held one hand in the water—and Olav felt an envy of the senses; how good and cool it must be! The girl looked fresh and unweary; she sat and took her ease.

Then he pulled harder—all the harder for the pain he felt in hands and shoulders and in the small of his back; he clenched his teeth and rowed furiously a short space. It was a great deed he had undertaken for her sake, this rowing; and he knew, with pride and a melancholy sense of injury, that he would never have thanks for it: “there she sits playing with her hand over the side and never has a thought of my toiling.” The sweat poured off him, and his outgrown kirtle chafed worse and worse at the arm-holes. He had forgotten that it was his business that brought them; once more he pursed his lips, swept his arm across his red and sweaty face, and took a few more mighty pulls.

“Now I see the towers over the woods,” said Ingunn at last.

Olav turned and looked over his shoulder—it hurt his stiff neck past believing. Across the perfectly hopeless expanse of a fiord he saw the light stone towers of Christ Church above the trees on a point of land. Now he was so tired that he could have given up altogether.

He rounded the point, where the convent of preaching friars lay far out on raised foundations; it was a group of dark timber houses about a stave-church, with roofs of tarred shingles, one above another, dragon heads on the gables and gilt weathercocks above the ridge-turret, in which the mass bell hung.

Olav put in to the monks’ pier. He washed the worst of the sweat from him before he climbed up, stiff and spent. Ingunn was already at the convent gate talking with the lay brother who had charge of some labourers; they were bearing bales of goods down to a little trading craft.