Otherwise, the day passed quietly. Sigrun did not get up, but slept for hours together. And she was not the only one. The whole of the household seemed to have fallen into the same slumber as its mistress.
"It's all so quiet about the house to-day, it's almost uncanny," said the cook and the housemaid, when they came out to the brewhouse to ask how Mistress was getting on. "Like as if someone was on a death-bed."
The Pastor sent for Lotta, to ask after his wife. And Lotta went in and told him, with perfect truth, that Sigrun was asleep, had no fever, and that the slight cut on her forehead was nothing to speak of.
But when he suggested that Sigrun should be moved back into the house, Lotta firmly refused. Much better leave her where she was. She was all of a tremble still, and nervous.
"Afraid of me, I suppose," said her husband.
His face was marked with suffering. It was not only the broken leg that caused him pain.
"She will come back of her own accord, once she is strong again," said Lotta hastily.
The sick man sighed. "She will never come back to me," he said. "Never to me. She will never have the courage to come back."
Lotta Hedman had not thought she could ever feel any pity for the man who had destroyed her beautiful dreams as a girl. But now she tried, at any rate, to comfort him.
"Oh, surely, happiness will come to the house again," she said.