The knife-grinder suggested making to the eastward, up toward Dalsland. "There's the railway runs from there to Göteborg, too, and nobody 'll know you there."
They turned off accordingly, along a road running east, leading up again through a wild and barren mountain tract.
The going was better here, but the poor beast was nearly spent. And after a third halt for rest and food, it had come to the bottom of its fodder bag.
The knife-grinder brought out some bread and butter and fell to. Sigrun had nothing to eat with her, but she was not hungry.
Afterward, when she looked back on that day, she wondered at herself.
"It was strange. I was altogether calm, and felt nothing at all. No uneasiness, no weariness, not even hunger. I knew all the time all would turn out as it should. I was numbed, as it were, in a way, but I was strong and able to hold out all the time. There must have been something at hand, too, that helped me."
While on the long road up to the plateau she asked a question.
"Did you not say this morning that the woman who died was not your wife?"
"I said so, yes. And it's the truth. She has a good husband and a decent home, but she liked better to go off with me."
And Sigrun questioned him further; not that the matter interested her at all—nothing in the world interested her that day. But talking made the time pass more easily.