"Well, then, go inside, into the kitchen. She's been asking for you."

I went in and Fruen said:

"I wondered where you'd got to. Sit down and have something to eat.
_Had_ your supper? Where?"

"We've food with us in the sack."

"Well, there was no need to do that. Won't you have a cup of tea, then?
Nothing?... I've had an answer from my husband. Can you fell trees? Well,
that's all right. Look, here it is: 'Want couple of men felling timber,
Petter will show trees marked.'...."

Heaven--she stood there beside me, pointing to the message. And the scent
of a young girl in her breath....




XVI


In the woods. Petter is one of the farm-hands; he showed us the way here.

When we talked together, Falkenberg was not by any means so grateful to
Fruen for giving us work. "Nothing to bow and scrape for in that," he
said. "It's none so easy to get workmen these days." Falkenberg, by the
way, was nothing out of the ordinary in the woodcutting line, while I'd
had some experience of the work in another part of the world, and so could