Helga slept but a short time. Suddenly she opened her eyes, rose abruptly, and looked about her in bewilderment.
"What is this? Why am I lying here?" she asked in an astonished voice. As soon as she spoke, she felt a choking in her throat, and remembered all of a sudden what had happened, and why she lay there. Then she collapsed with a groan, and remained sitting for a while with her face hidden in her hands. Then she straightened herself abruptly.
"How did it happen?" she asked in a hoarse, uncontrolled voice, and looked straight in front of her with a hard expression on her young face. And when Ingolf did not answer at once, she added in a still more unrestrained tone: "Tell me at once!"
Ingolf told her, hesitatingly and in disconnected words, that his serfs had found Hjor-Leif and his men dead. It looked as if Hjor-Leif's Irish serfs had killed them.
"But the women?" Helga asked in the same tone as before.
Ingolf gave it as his opinion that the serfs must have taken the women with them to whatever hiding they had sought. He added a few cautious words to the effect that he had grounds for supposing that Hjor-Leif already a year ago had been afraid of what had now happened, and that therefore he had let her remain with him and Hallveig.
Then Helga laughed, if the sound which issued from her throat could be called laughter.
"It is all the same now," she said in a hard voice.
Then she collected herself and stretched out her hand toward the child. For a while she sat stroking his hair and trying to smile at him. Then suddenly she gave Hallveig the boy and looked up at her brother with a look that revealed all her hopeless despair without disguise, and said: "I want to see him. Can we not go there?"