Axel could stand it no
longer; he stopped dead one day in the middle of the room and saw it
all as by a revelation. Great Heaven! every one must have seen how
it was with her, heavy with child and plain to see--and now with her
figure as before--but where was the child? Suppose others came to look
for it? They would be asking about it sooner or later. And if there
had been nothing wrong, it would have been far better to have had the
child buried decently in the churchyard. Not there in the bushes,
there on his land....

"No. 'Twould only have made a fuss," said Barbro. "They'd have cut it
open and had an inquest, and all that. I didn't want to be bothered."

"If only it mayn't come to worse later on," said he.

Barbro asked easily: "What's there to worry about? Let it lie where it
is." Ay, she smiled, and asked: "Are you afraid it'll come after you?
Leave all that nonsense, and say no more about it."

"Ay, well...."

"Did I drown the child? I've told you it drowned itself in the water
when I slipped in. I never heard such things as you get in your head.
And, anyway, it would never be found out," said she.

"'Twas found out all the same with Inger at Sellanraa," said Axel.

Barbro thought for a moment. "Well, I don't care," said she. "The
law's all different now, and if you read the papers you'd know.
There's heaps that have done it, and don't get anything to speak of."
Barbro sets out to explain it, to teach him, as it were--getting him
to take a broad view of things. It was not for nothing she herself had
been out in the world and seen and heard and learned so much; now she
could sit here and be more than a match for him. She had three main
arguments which she was continually advancing: In the first place,
she had not done it. In the second, it was not such a terrible thing,
after all, if she had done it. But in the third place, it would never
be found out.

"Everything gets found out, seems to me," he objected.

"Not by a long way," she answered. And whether to astonish him or to
encourage him, or perhaps from sheer vanity and as something to boast
of, all of a sudden she threw a bombshell. Thus: "I've done something
myself that never got found out."

"You?" said he, all unbelieving. "What have you done?"

"What have I done? Killed something."

She had not meant, perhaps, to go so far, but she had to go on now;
there he was, staring at her. Oh, and it was not grand, indomitable
boldness even; it was me