The girl took the bucket and went; but when she came out on to the steps again, she shook her head. Fru Wangen wanted to be alone. Besides, the girl then added, she had got up and was going to see her children.
“But what is she going to do now?” asked Fru Thora.
“Nobody knows,” said the girl. “She doesn’t say a word about it.”
Fru Thora had tears in her eyes as she went homewards. Of course this dinner for Norby must wound Fru Wangen, but it really could not be helped. Guilt is guilt, and reparation must be made to the innocent.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the dinner was at seven. The last loads of hay had been driven in from the fields, and the well-raked hills had taken on a soft, dark green colour; while the leafy slopes had here and there begun to get golden patches, upon which the sun shone.
When, at about six o’clock, the first carriages drove up towards the town-hall, they met near the fjord a tall, pale woman, hurrying along with bent head. It was Fru Wangen. Her little, faded straw hat seemed to have been put on in a hurry, and stood off too much from her head, raised by the quantity of fair hair that still lay like a crown above her pale beautiful face.
When she got out to the ridge that descends steeply to the fjord, she saw no more carriages in front of her, and seated herself upon a stone by the wayside. She rested her elbows on her knees, and her chin in her hands, and gazed out over the fjord whose calm surface reflected the red clouds in the sky.
When she had seen the children, where should she go?—what should she do? Could she keep both herself and them? Or—Oh no, she ought not to think of that now; for thinking was what she could not and dared not do. She passed her hand across her forehead and sighed. “I must take care,” she thought, “that what is in there doesn’t get loose, for then I might go mad; and then I shouldn’t be allowed even to see the children.”