"What are you crying for, mother?"
For a while his words were the only sound in the room, and therefore they came back to him again and again, so often that he felt they had not been said gently enough. He asked once more:—
"What are you crying for?"
"Oh, I am sure I do not know;" but now she wept harder than ever.
He waited a long time, then was forced to say, as courageously as he could:—
"There must be something you are crying about!"
Again there was silence. He felt very guilty, although she had said nothing, and he knew nothing.
"It just happened so," said the mother. Presently she added, "I am after all most fortunate," and then she wept.
But Arne hastened out, and he felt drawn toward the Kamp gorge. He sat down to look into it, and while he was sitting there, he too wept. "If I only knew what I was crying for," mused Arne.
Above him, in the new-plowed field, Upland Knut was singing his song:—