CHAPTER V.
KARIN AND ELSA.
There was a new, low mound in the churchyard. Kind young hands from the curate's had covered it with evergreen boughs, and sprinkled among them bright flowers, so that it seemed but a slight swell in the green sweep around it dotted with daisies.
Karin had begun a new phase in her life. She had something to love and respect which had no taint of this present world and the worldliness reigning therein. She had entered humbly and heartily into the simple life at the curate's home, where she had been so lovingly welcomed.
That thin man, with the angular, loosely-built figure, with a speaking expression of poverty about it; that man whose shabby Sunday coat had not a button-hole that did not publicly tell of privately-done repairs by his wife's untailor-like hand; that man whose very hair was scanty, and was changing colour—she looked up to him as if he had been a prince. And so he was; for he had a Father who was King over all the nations of the earth, who loved him as a son, and received from that son the happy, truthful affection of a true child.
That woman who went about in the simplest of garments, and shunned no form of labour that made the home more comfortable or attractive, had become to Karin a model of all that was pure and lovely and lovable. The baby, who fell much to her care, seemed to have a healing influence on her wounded, humbled, penitent heart. It had for her its artless smile, and its little arms went out to her as trustfully as if she had never strayed from the narrow path. Karin had a new standard in life, a new picture of what she wished to be, a new way of estimating her fellow-creatures.
Karin was glad that circumstances made it necessary for her to lay down in the depths of her capacious trunk the gay garments that had been her pride. There had been no dressmaking, no consulting of milliner or modiste. Like most Swedish girls, she had a black dress; she had but to put a crape band over her sailor-hat, and let the short crape veil fall over her solemnized face, and her mourning suit was for the present complete.
This time, this precious time, went away all too rapidly, but it swept from Karin the impressions of years, and strengthened in her, day by day, the new purposes and the new hopes that had sprung up in the midst of her humiliation and distress.
From the cottage in the woods the daughter had but taken away her mother's "psalm-book" in its close-fitting black cotton case, her worn Bible, and the carefully-folded white handkerchief that lay under them. In the corner of the handkerchief a large K had been embroidered by unskilful hands. Karin knew it as one of her own early trophies, that had been given to her mother in pride when she had received it as a reward for skill shown in the sewing-class at school. This little remembrance of her had been treasured and prized while she was living in selfish forgetfulness of the poor old woman far away. Repentant tears had fallen on the humble memento.