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manner of Jörund’s that made Olav like him, so long as he was in the room with him. But if he chanced to think of Jörund Rypa when he no longer had him before his eyes, Olav felt a profound, obscure ill will toward his son’s friend.
    With unreasonable clarity he recalled an ugly little act he had seen this man do when he was a boy—one day when he and some other lads were snowballing here in the yard; Jörund had then behaved disloyally to Eirik. It was a small thing to lay so much stress on, a child’s trick during a children’s game; but at the time it had revolted Olav like the blackest treason, and the impression had remained with him, so that he could not think of Jörund without antipathy.
    But when he was in Jörund’s company this feeling vanished almost entirely—he could see the injustice of laying a long-past boyish trick to the charge of this grown man. Jörund conducted himself becomingly, was quiet in his manner, looked folk frankly in the face, and never spoke without need. Olav saw therefore that he was unjust in thinking of the young man as though there were something underhand about him, for there w
as
nothing underhand about Jörund Rypa, either in his speech or in his face or in his eyes.
    One day Olav chanced to hear a scrap of talk between brother and sister. He was busy in the smithy when Eirik came to the door with Cecilia. They stopped outside.
    “—every maid would be glad to be married to Jörund Kolbeinsson,” said Eirik.
    “Then ’twill not be hard for him to find a match.”
    “But how comes it, sister, that
you
like not Jörund?”
    “I never said that I like him not,” replied Cecilia.
    “You said so but now, when I asked you.”
    “’Tis not to say I like him
not”—
there was a laugh in Cecilia’s voice—“if I answer no when you ask me do I
like
your friend!”
    “But is it not one and the same thing? If you do not like him, then surely you like him
not?”
    “No, ’tis
not
the same!” The girl was laughing now; Olav heard her run on down the field. Eirik opened the door and came in, smiling at his sister’s words.
    This new, exhilarating fondness for his sister filled Eirik’s heart entirely. It was as though all his childhood’s unrequited affection for his father, his anxious and burning passion for Hestviken, had dissolved in the sunny warmth and peaceful well-being of these summer days; the evil in it ran away, and the good was left behind, remoulded as a warm and golden joy in this little sister’s winning brightness and pert girlish charm. He followed her about at home, he had to have her with him whenever he went abroad, he lavished gifts on her—the best jewels and clothes he possessed, which he had never thought to part with.
    He rejoiced in everything wherever he went over his father’s land—his love for this land, which was to be always his, was increased by a vague memory of his strange thought, as a child, that he might lose it in the end. It was the same as with Hestviken itself when the sun returned after a long spell of bad weather: never did the fields and the manor gleam with so bright a glance as then.
    It was almost the same with his love for his father. It had been the groundwork of Eirik’s whole life that no man in the world was like his father; the only change was that he no longer
thought
about it. He no longer took it to heart that his father was taciturn and could by no means be called a man of good cheer—they were now friends in spite of that. Eirik did not see that it harmed anyone if his father was gloomy and cross; he himself had now grown out of the shadow that Olav cast around him.
    He took his ease and disported himself in the glory of his ownyouth. His sister had grown into a winsome maid; he could share his joy in life with her. He had his best friend with him, and the three together enjoyed the happiness that each day brought.
    Thus it was that he had already half formed the thought that Jörund spoke one evening