At first things did not go as Josephine expected. With the exception of
his sister and brother-in-law, everybody welcomed Edward Kallem and his
wife back to his native town. At the house of Pastor Meek, the oldest
and most influential of the clergy, Ragni was introduced to a middle-
aged lady, who startled her by saying:

"I am Sören Kule's sister. I want to tell you that, in your position, I
should have acted just as you did."

This, indeed, was the general verdict. No one who knew Sören Kule blamed
Ragni. An old rake, blind and half-paralysed as the immediate result of
ill-living, he had worried his first wife, Ragni's sister, into the
grave, and then taken advantage of the young girl's innocence to marry
her. The man was a mass of corruption, and his second marriage was one
of those strangely cruel crimes which go unpunished in the present state
of society. Kallem, who was then lodging in the same house as Kule, was
maddened by it. Being a doctor, he foresaw clearly the fate of the pure,
lovely, girlish victim of Kule's brutal passion, and in rescuing her
from it he had displayed, in the opinion of his friends, the chivalry of
soul of a modern knight-errant.

Pastor Meek was a liberal-minded and courageous old man; he showed his
sympathy with the Kallems, and his trust in them, in a practical manner.

"My grandson, Karl," he said to Kallem, "is at school here. I wish you
would let him come, now and then, to your house. He is only nineteen
years old, but he promises to be a first-rate composer. Your wife plays
the piano beautifully. They ought to get on well together."

Kallem was so pleased with this mark of approval that he went the next