So it was for Lotta Hedman. Coming back to the outhouse at three in the morning, she found all as she had left it, and began as well as she could to make preparations for what was to come. She gathered the dead woman's clothes together, thrust them into the stove, with an armful of wood, and burned all to ashes. Then she washed out the stove and drew her curtains across, leaving all looking as it had done the evening before.
Trembling and terrified, she went into the adjoining room where the dead woman lay. She was not afraid of the dead, as a rule, but she felt it here. Sigrun and she had sorely wronged the dead, and she could not approach the bedside without a shudder. Nevertheless, she carried out her plan—took out a sheet and laid it over the body, hiding it completely, and with deep feeling read a prayer or two.
This gave her comfort. She felt now with certainty that the dead woman was no longer an enemy to herself and her mistress, but their faithful helper and ally, of whom she need have no fear.
Lotta endeavoured also to prepare herself for what she must say to those in the house. She called to mind that no one had seen Sigrun all the previous day; she could therefore say that her new illness had begun the night before that. Sigrun had not wished a doctor to be sent for on her account; she thought it was only a little rash breaking out, and nothing dangerous. Then ... what was she to say next?
Lotta walked up and down the room, thinking it over. But after a while she felt too weary and discouraged to move about, and sat down in a chair instead. Soon this too seemed uncomfortable; she rose, and stood leaning against a wall. At last she sank to the floor, close by the bed where the dead woman lay, and stayed there so.
"I ought to go in to the Pastor," she thought. "I ought to wake the servants." But she did neither, only sat still, repeating her explanations to herself and turning them over every way.
"It will all be found out some way or other," she told herself. "And we shall be miserable and shamed, both Sigrun and I. It is terrible to sit and wait like this."
An unexpected comfort relieved her for a little while from her fears and anxiety.
As she sat there on the floor, bowed down by dread of what was to come, her soul took flight from her body, and, rising, hovered away into space between the worlds.
Soon it had risen so far that Lotta Hedman could see earthly things in their proportion; she saw now, not fragments of things, but things themselves in their whole extent. Not merely a stretch of river and stream, but the whole course of the waters from source to mouth. Not a little corner of the forest only, but the mighty expanse of trees in its whole extent. She could follow the line of a mountain chain from end to end. Plains spread out beneath her, and the contours of the land showed clearly marked against the glittering surface of the seas.