When Clifford said good-bye to Knutty and passed out of sight into the birch-woods, he had no intention of going in any definite direction. He wished to get on to the heights somewhere and be alone with Nature, that tender nurse who is ever waiting to hold out her healing hands to the sick of body and of spirit. She had never failed him, and he knew that she would not fail him now; that she would minister to him in her own beautiful, strengthening way, until she had made him whole; putting balm on stinging wounds, and exchanging his cup of bitterness for a phial of courage. He had always loved her, always sought her out, always laid everything before her, and learnt from her, over and over again, the relative value and the actual size of the difficulties which life presented to him. He had carried out to her some burden which seemed enormous, and brought it back from her so shrunk that he would scarcely have known it for his burden; rather for some one else's load, which is always deemed lighter. So he went to seek her help. He strolled through the birch-woods, scarcely noticing where he trod; gained the open slopes, and then climbed slowly in the direction of a little isolated Saeter which commanded a view of the fine Rondane mountains. He paused now and then, and dug his stick into the springy moss and the stunted juniper-bushes.
"The boy always loved me," he said bitterly. "And now?"
And Nature said:
"He will love you again."
"Ever since the little fellow could find his way about he wanted to be with me," he said bitterly. "And now?"
And Nature said:
"He will want to be with you again."
"It is all so much worse than I thought," the man said bitterly. "At the very worst I thought that he might have believed I had been unkind to Marianne. But——"
And Nature said:
"He did not know what he did believe. The tiny cone of disbelief had grown into one of my giant forest-trees. But now we have hewn down that giant tree, used it to defeat itself, and made a strong bridge of it, over which the boy passes to reach you again."