“Put on your cloak—”

Ingunn’s cloak still hung in her mother’s room; she had not fetched it in all these fourteen days, but had worn Olav’s fine mantle when she needed an outer garment. Her mother went in with her. She stirred the fire on the hearth and lighted the lantern.

“Your father and I were wont to move into the great loft in summer—had we been sleeping there the night Mattias came, he could not have taken Steinfinn unawares. It will be safer for us to sleep there till Steinfinn be made free of the law.”

The great loft-room had no outside stairway, for it had been used for storing household goods of value. From the floor below, a ladder led up into the loft. It was not often that Ingunn had been up there; the very smell of the place gave her a solemn feeling. Bags of strong-smelling spices hung among bedcovers of fur and leather sacks—there was almost an uncanny look about all the things that hung from the roof. Against the walls stood great chests. Ingunn went up to Olav’s and let the light fall on it; it was of pale limewood, and carved.

Ingebjörg opened the door to the balcony. She emptied the bedstead of all that was piled upon it and began searching in chests and coffers, making her daughter hold the light for her; then she dropped on the floor all she had in her hands and went out on the balcony.

The moon was now so far to the westward that its light lay like a golden bridge over the water. It was about to sink into a bank of heavy blue cloud, some shreds of which floated up toward the moon and were gilded.

The mother went in again and turned over more of the chests. She had come upon a woman’s gown of silk—green with a woven pattern of yellow flowers—the light of the lantern gave the whole kirtle the tint of a fading aspen.

“This I will give to you now—”

Ingunn curtsied and kissed her mother’s hand. A silken gown she had never owned before. From a little casket of walrus ivory her mother took a green velvet ribbon, set all over with silver gilt roses. She put it over the crown of her daughter’s head, pushed it a little forward, and brought the ends together at the back of the neck under the hair.

“So. Fair as you looked to be when you were small, you are not—but you have grown fairer again this summer. ’Tis time for you to wear the garland—you are a marriageable maid now, my Ingunn.”

“Yes; Olav and I have spoken of that too,” Ingunn took courage to say. She strove instinctively to speak as naturally as she could.

Ingebjörg looked up—they were both crouching before a chest.

“Have Olav and you spoken of that?”

“Yes.” Ingunn spoke as calmly as before, dropping her eyelids meekly. “We are old enough now to expect that you will soon see to the fulfilment of this bargain that was made for us.”

“Oh, that bargain was not of a kind that cannot be undone again,” said her mother; “if you yourselves have no mind to it. We shall not force you.”

“Nay, but we are well pleased with what you have purposed for us,” said Ingunn meekly. “We are agreed that it is well as our fathers have disposed.”

“So that is the way of it.” Ingebjörg stared thoughtfully before her. “Then I doubt not some means will be found—Do you like Olav well?” she asked.

“What could I do else? We have known each other so long, and he has always been good and kind and has shown himself dutiful toward you.”

Her mother nodded thoughtfully.

“We knew not, Steinfinn and I, whether you two remembered aught of that bargain or thought more of it. Ay, some means must be found, one way or another. At your age you two cannot be so closely tied. Handsome he is, Olav. And Audun left wealth behind him—”

Ingunn would fain have said more of Olav. But she saw that her mother was far away in her own thoughts again.

“We went by desert paths, your father and I, when we crossed the fells,” she said. “From Vors we took to the moors, and then we passed through the upper dales. There was still much snow on the fells. In one place we had to stay a whole week in a stone hut.