But although the old man had always let it be thought that he could read and write as well as any priest—and much better than Sira Benedikt, their parish priest—there was in any case not much that he could make out of Cecilia Björnsdatter’s psalter. In the evening Olav sat and looked at it: little images were drawn within the capital letters, and the margins were adorned with twining foliage in red and green. When he went to bed he buried the book under the pillow, and there he let it lie.

A few days before he was to set out for the north there came a poor woman to Hestviken who wished to speak with the master. Olav went out to her. She bore an empty wallet on her shoulder, so he guessed her errand. But first she greeted Olav with tears in her voice—tears of joy, she said; ’twas such a glad thing to see the rightful master stand at his own door at last, “and a fair and lordly man have you grown, Olav Audunsson—ay, Cecilia ought to have seen her son now—and they speak well of you among the neighbours, Olav. So methought I must come hither and see you—and I was among the first who saw you in this world, for I served at Skildbreid at that time and I was with Margret, my mistress, when she came to help your mother—I gave her a hand when she swathed you—”

“Then you knew my mother?” asked Olav when the woman had to pause for want of breath.

“You know, we saw her at church sometimes, when first Audun had brought her hither. But that winter she grew so sickly that she never went abroad—’twas too cold, the house she lived in, her handmaid said, and at last she had to move into the great room, where the old men were, for the sake of the warmth. It was right ill with Torgils that winter and spring. I mind me he raved most foully the night you were born, and the fit was upon him a whole week—Cecilia was in such fear of him, she lay trembling in her bed, and Audun himself could not comfort her. ’Twas that, I ween, that broke her, that and the cold. Audun carried her up to the loft-room when the weather was warmer; he saw she was not fit to dwell in the house with the madman—but she died straight. You must have been a month old then—”

The woman’s name was Gudrid, she told him, and she lived in the cot that maybe Olav had seen when he rode east to the church town—to the north of the bogs, just before the road turns off toward Rynjul. In her first marriage she had had a little farm in the Saana district—with a good and worthy husband, but she had had no child by him. Then he died, and his brother moved to the farm with his wife; and as she could not be agreed with them, she married this Björn, with whom she was now. This was the most foolish counsel she could have taken. Nay, he was no poor man at that time; when they put together their goods, they might have had an easy lot. He was a widower and had only one daughter, and so they deemed that all might turn out well: she was minded to take a husband again, and she greatly desired to have children. And that wish alone was granted, of all she had looked for—eight children, and five of them lived. But the very first winter they were married Björn chanced to slay a man and had to pay fines, and there was soon an end of their prosperity. Now Björn was mostly out in the fiord, hunting seal and porpoise and sea-fowl, or fishing for Tore of Hvitastein—and she herself sat in the cot with all her little children and the stepdaughter, who was shrewish and ungodly—

Olav listened patiently to the woman’s torrent of words, and at last he bade her follow him to the storehouse. He had laid in all that was needed for his home-coming feast, and he filled Gudrid’s sack abundantly—“and if you are in straits this winter, you must come hither and tell us, foster-mother!”

“God bless you, Olav Audunsson—but you are like your mother when you smile! She had so gentle a smile, Cecilia, and she was always good to poor folk—”

At long last the old wife departed.

There was no one in the hall when Olav entered. And he stood awhile musing. With one foot on the edge of the hearth, and his hands clasped about his knee, he stared into the little heap of burned wood in which there was still a gleam—it hissed and crackled with crisp little sounds, and a faint breath came from the dying embers.

“Mother,” he thought, and recalled the little he had heard of her. She had been young—and fair, they said; she had been reared as became one of noble birth in the rich nunnery, where she was the playmate of a King’s daughter. And from the Queen’s court she had been removed to this lonely manor, far from all she knew. In these poor and rustic rooms she had borne him under her heart, starved with the cold and left alone with two aged men—the madman, of whom she was afraid, and the master himself, who mis-liked his grandson’s marriage.—It was hateful.

He smote his thigh hard with the palm of his hand. Intolerable it must be to be born a woman, to have so little say in one’s own destiny. He seemed to pity all women—his own mother in silk and fine linen, this beggar woman Gudrid, Ingunn—it availed one as little as the other to meet force by force. Ingunn—a wave of desire and longing rose within him—he thought of her slender white neck: poor thing, she had learned perforce to bend her proud young head.