"Don't go, Alan," Knutty said a little anxiously. "You don't know which way he will come back."
"Knutty," the boy asked shyly, "did he tell you we'd—we'd—we'd——"
"Yes," answered Knutty, with a comforting nod. "I know all about it."
"I feel quite a different fellow now," Alan said. "And father was so awfully good to me. He wasn't angry or upset or anything. And he was just splendid about mother, and—and, Knutty, I—I shall always hate myself."
"You may do that as much as you like, so long as you love him," Knutty said. "Now help me up, stakkar. I am going to take another lesson in the making of fladbröd. And Mette is beckoning to me that she is ready to begin."
As they strolled together across the courtyard to the hut where Mette was making the fladbröd, Knutty said:
"I feel ten stone lighter to-day to think that my darling icebergs have come together again. They must never drift apart any more."
"Never," said Alan eagerly; and Knutty, glancing at him out of the corner of her sharp little eyes, was satisfied that Clifford had won or was winning his son back to their old loving comradeship.
"Ah," she thought, "how unconscious the boy is of the wound he has inflicted on his father. Well, that's all right. It is only fair on the young that they should not realise the limits of their own understanding."
So they went in and watched the bright and dramatic Mette, with whom Tante had an affinity, making fladbröd for the funeral guests. She explained that she was making the best quality now: cooked potato, barley and rye, finely powdered and mixed, without water. Gaily she rolled this mystic compound until it was as thin as a sheet of paper, and she whipped it off with a flourish on to the top of the fladbröd-oven, known as a "Takke," a round, flat iron oven placed for the time being in the Peise. Then she turned it at the right moment on to its other side, and whisked it off with another flourish on to the top of a great pile of fladbröd, which looked like a ruined pillar of classic times.