It was really a matter of utter indifference to her how they treated her at the Parsonage. They were very kind to her, as far as she knew, but it really did not matter. If she had come to a palace full of everything one could most desire, that would likewise have been the same to her. No bed is soft enough to give rest unto one whose heart is full of longing.
In the beginning she had asked them every day, as modestly as she could, if they would not let her go home, now that she had had the great happiness of seeing her mother and her brothers and sisters. But the roads were really too bad. She must stay with them until the frost had disappeared. It was not a matter of life and death, they supposed, to go back to that place.
Ingrid could not understand why it annoyed people when she said she wanted to go back to Munkhyttan. But this seemed to be the case with her father and her mother and everybody else in the parish. One had no right, it appeared, to long for any other place in the world, when one was at Raglanda.
She soon saw it was best not to speak about her going away. There were so many difficulties in the way whenever she spoke about it. It was not enough that the roads were still in the same bad condition; they surrounded her with walls and ramparts and moats. She would knit and weave, and plant out in the forcing-frames. And surely she would not go away until after the large birthday party at the Dean's? And she could not think of leaving till after Karin Landberg's wedding.
There was nothing for her to do but to lift her hands in supplication to the spring, and beg it to make haste with its work, beg for sunshine and warmth, beg the gentle sun to do its very best for the great border forest, send small piercing rays between the fir-trees, and melt the snow beneath them. Dear, dear sun! It did not matter if the snow were not melted in the valley, if only the snow would vanish from the mountains, if only the forest paths became passable, if only the Säter girls were able to go to their huts, if only the bogs became dry, if only it became possible to go by the forest road, which was half the distance of the highroad.
Ingrid knew one who would not wait for carriage, or ask for money to drive, if only the road through the forest became passable. She knew one who would leave the Parsonage some moonlight night, and who would do it without asking a single person's permission.
She thought she had waited for the spring before. That everybody does. But now Ingrid knew that she had never before longed for it. Oh no, no! She had never before known what it was to long. Before she had waited for green leaves and anemones, and the song of the thrush and the cuckoo. But that was childishness—nothing more. They did not long for the spring who only thought of what was beautiful. One should take the first bit of earth that peeped through the snow, and kiss it. One should pluck the first coarse leaf of the nettle simply to burn into one that now the spring had come.
Everybody was very good to her. But although they did not say anything, they seemed to think that she was always thinking of leaving them.
'I can't understand why you want to go back to that place and look after that crazy fellow,' said Karin Landberg one day. It seemed as if she could read Ingrid's thoughts.
'Oh, she has given up thinking of that now,' said the Pastor's wife, before the young girl had time to answer.