alone with her thoughts. Behind the hop garden there was a
narrow seat upon which she often sat, with her elbows on her knees
and her chin resting in her hands, staring straight ahead, yet
seeing nothing. Fronting her were great stretches of cornfields,
beyond which was the forest, and in the distance the range of hills
and Mount Klack.

One evening in April she sat on her bench, feeling tired and
listless, as one often does in the springtime when the snow turns
to slush and the ground is still unwashed by spring rains. The hops
lay sleeping under a cover of fir brush. Over against the hills
hung a thick mist, such as always accompanies a thaw. The birch
tops were beginning to turn brown, but all along the skirt of the
forest there was still a deep border of snow. Spring would soon
be there in earnest, and the thought of it made her feel even more
tired. She felt that she could never live through another summer
like the last one. She thought of all the work ahead of her--sowing
and haymaking; spring baking and spring cleaning; weaving and
sewing--and wondered how she would ever get through with it all.

"I might better be dead," she sighed. "I seem to be here for no
other purpose than to prevent Elof killing himself with drink."

Suddenly she looked up, as if she had heard some one calling her.
Leaning against the hedge, looking straight at her, stood Halvor
Halvorsson. She did not know just when he had come, but apparently
he had been standing there a good while.

"I thought I should find you over here," Halvor said.

"Oh, did you?"

"I remembered how in days gone by you used to step away, and come
here to sit and brood."

"I didn't have much to brood over at that time."

"Then your troubles were mostly imaginary."

Karin mused as she looked at Halvor: "He must be thinking what a
fool I was not to have married him, who is such a handsome and
dignified man. Now he's got me where he can crow over me, and he
has come only to laugh at me."

"I've been inside talking with Elof," Halvor enlightened. "It was
really him I wanted to see."

Karin made no reply, but sat there, frigid and unresponsive, her
eyes fixed on the ground and her hands crossed, prepared to meet
all the scorn she fancied Halvor would now heap upon her.

"I said to him," Halvor continued, "that I considered myself
largely to blame for his misfortune, since it was at my place that
he got hurt." He paused a moment, as if waiting for some expre