She clasped him around the neck, and kissed him with passionate fierceness.
“If you owe me anything, pay it to Eric,” she whispered in his ear, and then turned away and began violently to stir the soup.
At that, Snowfrid took a hand from her hip to draw the back of the wrist across her eyes, and signified that she was going to see him off by slipping out ahead into the gray light.
Though the darkness had melted from the air, there lingered in it yet that chill of unreality which makes earth and trees and even rocks seem but phantoms of themselves. As they crossed the grass, Randvar said, “It has the look of a dead world that is waiting for the sun to bring it to life,” and the girl shivered assent and drew closer to him.
At the entrance to the path she stopped, and he turned for a parting look at the dwelling that his father’s gentled strength had built and his mother’s courageous love had hallowed. In the grayness it loomed as remote and unreal as all the rest, the firelight that showed wanly through the archways only adding to its shadowy strangeness.
“It seems to me that life is only just beginning for me, too,” he said slowly as he gazed.
“You ought not to feel so,” the girl cried reproachfully. “You ought to feel that you are going away from your father and mother.”
He shook his head. “I feel instead that I am coming closer to them. It was my father’s lot before me to leave his home and go forth to try what the gods would grant him.” As standing on the same spot he had lifted his hand in greeting to Erna, so now he raised it in farewell to the home scene. “It was a good dream while it lasted, but I am glad to be awake at last.”
Snowfrid burst into tears on his shoulder. “It is a wicked thing that men must grow up and go away!”
Times there were when she would have been shaken off with severity; even now he put her from him hastily, though he bent and kissed her, bantering.