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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. The weather had cleared and the sun was broiling hot—and as time went on, it w
as
a load: wallet, axe, cloak, and boots. True, Ingunn had once offered to carry some of it; but that was when they were passing through the forest and it was cool beneath the firs, with a grateful fresh scent of pine-needles and hair-moss and young leaves. The sun barely gilded the tree-tops, and the birds sang with full throat—and then the boy was still swayed by his new-born emotion. She bade him stop, she had to plait her hair anew, for she had forgotten her hair-band—ay, ’twas like her. But her tawny mane waved so finely over her forehead as she loosed the braids, making shady hollows at the temples, where the first short hairs lay close and curly, it softened his heart to look at it. So when she spoke of carrying, he only shook his head; and afterwards he heard no more of it.
    Down here on the fiord it was full summer. The children climbed a fence and made straight across an enclosure; the meadow was a slope of flowers, pink clouds of caraway and golden globe-flowers. Where there was a thin patch of soil among the rocks, the violets grew thick as a carpet, and within the shadeof the alder brake red catchflies blazed amid the luxuriant green. Ingunn stopped again and again to pluck flowers, and Olav grew more and more impatient; he longed to get down to the boat and be rid of his burden. He was hungry too—as yet neither of them had tasted food. But when she said that they could sit down and eat here in the shade by the brook, he replied shortly that it would be as he said. When they had got hold of a boat, they could make a meal before rowing away, but not till then.
    “You will always have your way,” said Ingunn querulously.
    “Ay, if I let you have yours we might reach the town tomorrow morning. But if you will listen to me, we shall be back to Frettastein by that time.”
    Then she laughed, flung away her flowers, and ran after him.
    All the way down, the children had followed the brook that ran north of the houses at Frettastein. On nearing the village it became a little river—on the flat, before it fell into the fiord, it spread out and ran broad and shallow over a bed of large smooth stones. The lake here formed a great round bay, with a beach strewed with sharp grey rocks that had fallen from the mountainside. A line of old alder trees grew along the bank of the stream right out to the lake.
    At high-water mark, where beach and greensward met, the path led by a cairn. The boy and girl stopped, hurried through a Paternoster and an Ave, and then each threw a stone upon the cairn as a sign that they had done their Christian duty by the dead. It was said to be one who had slain himself, but it was so long ago that Olav and Ingunn at any rate had never heard who the poor wretch might be.
    They had to cross the stream in order to reach the point where Olav had thought he could borrow a boat. This was easy enough for him, who walked barefoot, but Ingunn had not gone many steps before she began to whimper—the round pebbles slipped under her feet and the water was so cold and she was spoiling her best shoes.
    “Do but stand where you are and I will come and fetch you,” said Olav, and waded back to her.
    But when he had taken her up in his arms, he could not see where he put his feet, and in the middle of the river he fell with her.
    The icy water took away his breath for a moment—the whole world seemed to slew over. As long as he lived, this picture remained burned into him—all that he saw as he lay in the stream with Ingunn in his arms: light and shade dropping in patches