Helga thought that he was laughing to himself all the while. "You surely don't comprehend how hard it was for me!" she said, speaking faster and faster in her effort to make him understand her. "A great longing took possession of me and carried me out of myself. Not for a moment could I feel happy! Nothing was beautiful, nothing was a pleasure; not a human being could I become attached to. You all remained just as strange to me as you were the first time I entered the house."
"But didn't you say a moment ago that you wished to remain with us?" said Gudmund wonderingly.
"Of course I did!"
"Then, surely, you are not homesick now?"
"No, it has passed over. I have been cured. Wait, and you shall hear!"
As she said this, Gudmund crossed to the other side of the road and walked beside her, laughing to himself all the while. He seemed glad to hear her speak, but probably he didn't attach much importance to what she was relating. Gradually Helga took on his mood, and she thought everything was becoming easy and light. The church road was long and difficult to walk, but to-day she was not tired. There was something that carried her. She continued with her story because she had begun it, but it was no longer of much importance to her to speak. It would have been quite as agreeable to her if she might have walked silently beside him.
"When I was the most unhappy," she said, "I asked mother Ingeborg one Saturday evening to let me go home and remain over Sunday. And that evening, as I tramped over the hills to the marsh, I believed positively that I should never again go back to Närlunda. But at home father and mother were so happy because I had found service with good and respectable people, that I didn't dare tell them I could not endure remaining with you. Then, too, as soon as I came up into the forest all the anguish and pain vanished entirely. I thought the whole thing had been only a fancy. And then it was so difficult about the child. Mother had become attached to the boy and had made him her own. He wasn't mine any more. And it was well thus, but it was hard to get used to."
"Perhaps you began to be homesick for us?" blurted Gudmund.
"Oh, no! On Monday morning, as I awoke and thought of having to return to you, the longing came over me again. I lay crying and fretting because the only right and proper thing for me to do was to go back to Närlunda. But I felt all the same as though I were going to be ill or lose my senses if I went back. Suddenly I remembered having once heard some one say that if one took some ashes from the hearth in one's own home and strewed them on the fire in the strange place, one would be rid of homesickness."
"Then it was a remedy that was easy to take," said Gudmund.