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face in his hands.
    Then the thought came to him—she could never drown? Perhaps he ought not to have left her. But he
could
not go back—
    Down in the water it was as though a golden net quivered abovestones and mud—the reflection of sunlight on the surface. He grew giddy from looking down—felt as if he were afloat. The rock he lay on seemed to be moving through the water.
    And all the time he could not help thinking of Ingunn and being tormented by the thought. He felt plunged into guilt and shame, and it grieved him. They had been used to bathe from his canoe in the tarn above, swimming side by side in the brown water, into which a yellow dust was shed from the flowering spruces around. But now they could not be together as before-It was just as when he lay in the stream and saw the familiar world turned upside-down in an instant. He felt as if he had had another fall; humbled and ashamed and terrified, he saw the things he had seen every day from another angle, as he lay on the ground.
    It had been so simple and straightforward a thing that he should marry Ingunn when they were grown up. And he had always looked to Steinfinn to decide when it should be. The lad might feel a tingling when Steinfinn’s house-carls told tales of their commerce with women. But to him it had been clear that they did these things because they were men without ties, while he, being born to an estate, must keep himself otherwise. It had never disturbed his rest to think that he and Ingunn would live together and have children to take the inheritance after them.
    Now he felt he had been the victim of a betrayal—he was changed from what he had been, and Ingunn was changed in his eyes. They were wellnigh grown up, though none had told them this was coming; and these things that Steinfinn’s serving men and their womenfolk had to do with—ah, they tempted him too, for all she was his betrothed and he had an estate and she a dowry in her coffer.
    He saw her as she lay there face-down on the short, dry grass. She rested on one arm beneath her breast, so that her dress was drawn tight over the gentle rounding of her bosom; her tawny plaits wound snake-like in the heather. 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 allwho 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