"Bra', bra,' meget bra'" (Well, very well).
Indeed, she was not a little gratified to be once more the central figure of circumstances, as in the old days, before she and her husband had retired to the dower-house. But, spite of her cheerfulness, she looked a pathetic old figure wandering about, relieved from constant attendance at her sick husband's bedside, and thus thrown on the little outside world for distraction and company. Tante was endlessly kind to her, but had many a secret laugh over the old widow's unfunereal attitude of mind, and over her stubborn determination to go and bully every one in the kitchen. Tante herself was in great form again. She had recovered from her fears and tears, and had, so she told Katharine, regained her usual Viking bearing.
"Never shall I forget your tenderness, dear one," she said to Katharine. "If I loved him even a hundred times more than I do, I should not grudge him to you. He loves you, and you are the right aura for him. And some day he will tell you so, although it will not be very soon, stupid fellow! He will try and try many times, and leave off suddenly. I know him well, my prisoner of silence. These reserved people! What a nuisance they are to themselves, and every one else! But to themselves—ak, ak, poor devils!"
Katharine, who was standing at the time on Knutty's bedroom-balcony, looked out into the distance. She herself had been somewhat silent since that sad morning at the Skyds-station.
"The end of it all will be, dear one," Knutty continued recklessly, "that you will have to help him. This sort of man always has to be helped, otherwise he goes on beginning and leaving off suddenly until Doomsday. I know the genus well."
Katharine went away.
"Aha," said Knutty to herself, "I have said too much. And, after all, it is premature. Oh, these parish-clocks! Why, Marianne has only been dead about a year. How like her, only to have been dead about a year! Oh, oh, what a wicked old woman I am!"
She called Katharine, and Katharine came.
"Kjaere," she said, as she stroked Katharine's hand lovingly. "I have always been a free-lance with my naughty old tongue. No one with any sense takes any notice of me. And am I not funny and human too? All this time I have only been thinking that you are the right aura for my Clifford. Not once have I asked myself whether my Clifford were the right aura for you! I should have been an ideal mother, always on the alert to snatch up all the best things for those I loved, regardless of other people's feelings and interests. Ah, that is right, you are smiling, and not angry with your Viking friend. And, dear one, that reminds me again of how you comforted me when I was not behaving like a Viking. Do you remember assuring me that his absence, and Alan's anxiety for him, were working for their complete reconciliation? Your words have come beautifully true, haven't they? Well, you have the great heart that knows."
They were a small party at the Gaard now. Ejnar had gone off to Kongsvold in the Dovre mountains, a district specially interesting to botanists as the habitat of certain plants not found elsewhere. Gerda would have gone with him, but that she had sprained her ankle. She fretted for her Ejnar, although she pretended that his absence was a great relief.