had become sharper, and the firm lines
about her mouth expressed severity, almost
sternness. Her clear blue eyes seemed to have
grown larger, and their glance betrayed secret,
ever-watchful care. Only her yellow hair had
resisted the force of time and sorrow; for it
still fell in rich and wavy folds over a smooth
white forehead. She was, indeed, half ashamed
of it, and often took pains to force it into a
sober, matronly hood. Only at nights, when
she sat alone talking with her boy, she would
allow it to escape from its prison; and he would
laugh and play with it, and in his child's way
even wonder at the contrast between her stern
face and her youthful maidenly tresses.

This Thomas, her son, was a strange child.
He had a Norseman's taste for the fabulous and
fantastic, and although he never heard a tale of
Necken or the Hulder, he would often startle
his mother by the most fanciful combinations
of imagined events, and by bolder personifications
than ever sprung from the legendary soil
of the Norseland. She always took care to
check him whenever he indulged in these imaginary
flights, and he at last came to look upon
them as something wrong and sinful. The boy,
as he grew up, often strikingly reminded her of
her father, as, indeed, he seemed to have
inherited more from her own than from Halvard's