No man must learn that he had rid himself of Teit Hallsson, since thus he thought no man would learn that Ingunn had been disgraced by Teit. Now it seemed to him incomprehensible that he could have thought anything so totally fatuous.

But now he was caught in his own snares. Never would the Bishop give him absolution for a manslaughter on other terms than that he should publicly acknowledge the deed, that justice might be done. But now it had become a secret murder and dastard’s work, and never could it be anything else.

Behind him he had his manor, his lands along Kverndal, the forest on the ridges north and south of Hestviken—his property extended far inland into the mist. The sheds, the quay, his boats he could glimpse down in the creek; the smell came up to him of nets and tar and fish offal and salt water and wood soaked by the sea. And far away in the north Ingunn waited; God knew how she fared now. To take her out of her misfortune, bring her hither to a place of refuge, that was the first duty that lay upon him.

No. The burden he had been mad enough to fasten upon himself he would have to bear henceforward. He could not lay it down now. Perchance he would have to drag it on till he saw the gates of death open before him. And he might die—a sudden death—But that too he must venture. His case was not such that he could turn about and retrace his steps to the point where he had gone astray. He could only go on.

It was with such thoughts that he journeyed northward. Arrived at Berg, he learned from the mouth of Arnvid that Ingunn had tried to slay herself. Six weeks later he came home to Hestviken for the second time, bringing his wife with him

The sea lay glittering white in the sunshine beneath the burning hot cliff of the Bull when at noonday Olav led Ingunn ashore at the Hestvik hithe. It was the day after Lavransmass.6

The water gurgled under the boat’s side and smacked against the piles of the quay; the air was heavy with smells—salt water, sweating tar, rotten bait, and fish offal, but now and again there was a breath of flowery scent, sweet and warm and fleeting—Olav caught it and wondered, for it was so familiar. Memories were called forth by it, but he knew not what it was that had this scent.—All at once Vikings’ Bay and Hövdinggaard came vividly before him—that world which had wholly vanished from his memory since he fled from it to serve the Earl. At once he knew the smell—’twas lime trees. That fine moist breath as of honey and pollen and mead—there must be flowering lime trees somewhere in the neighbourhood.

The scent grew stronger as they walked up the slope. Olav could not understand it; he had never seen limes at Hestviken. But when he came up to the courtyard, he saw them growing on the steep cliff behind the cattle-sheds. They were firmly rooted in the crevices, clung flat against the face of the rock and let their branches sweep downward. The dark-green heart-shaped leaves lay one over another like the shingles on a church roof, covering the golden bunches of blossom—Olav could glimpse them underneath. They were fading and turning brown, and their scent was somewhat sickly and past, but there was a faint, soft buzz of bees and a swarm of flies about them.

“Nay, Olav, what is it that smells so sweet?” Ingunn asked in wonder.

“It is lime. You have never seen limes before, I ween—they grow not in the Upplands.”

“Ay, but they do. I mind me now—there is a lime tree in the garden of the preaching friars at Hamar. But I cannot see the trees.”

Olav pointed up at the cliff. “They are not like the trees that are planted on level ground, the limes that grow here.”

He recalled the mighty lime that stood in the castle court at Hövdinggaard—its waxen, honey-dewed flowers hung in the midst of the foliage as though under a tent of leaves. When the lime flowered at Hövdinggaard he had always had a longing—and it was not Frettastein or Heidmark or any of the places where his destiny had been set moving, but the half-forgotten home of his childhood that came to his mind. It must have been the scent of the lime blossom that he recognized—though he did not seem to have known that there were limes at Hestviken.

Toward sundown he wandered up Kverndal, to look at the cornfields on that side.