The Pastor shook his head.
"Now I cannot see what you are thinking of."
But Lotta answered steadily:
"I know what it is I have to say, and it is no easy thing to confess, but before I come to that, there is one thing more I must tell you first.
"I am not one to go tale-bearing about," she said, "and I have never said a word to Sigrun about it, but I know there is a place called Hånger. And I have heard the whole story of the priest who was murdered there, and the gatepost and the old woman at the window and the curse that lies on the men of Hånger. And it seems to me that a man who knows he is come of a strong, wild race, that has always been hard to get on with, and who knows, too, what manner of death awaits him—I think that man must have asked himself at times if he did right in taking for his wife a girl innocent and delicate as a newly opened leaf, and knowing nothing of all the dark within him."
"Lotta Hedman!"
The Pastor's voice was still calm enough; he was but warning Lotta not to go too far.
"Let me go on, Pastor," she begged. "For I do not say this in any reproach, but only to remind you that there are faults on both sides, though the fault on ours, on Sigrun's and mine, is so much the greater that it will need much mercy and forgiveness in your scale to balance it.
"And now I have only to tell you how it was Sigrun left us. And it is by her own wish that I tell you this. I have had a letter from her to-day, telling me to do it, and it has loosed me from my abasement and lifted me up out of my deceit, so that I can once more look my fellows in the face."
The fact that it was Lotta Hedman speaking, rendered her words less surprising to the Pastor than if it had been another. He thought she was about to tell him that Sigrun had not died of the smallpox, but had taken her own life, and that Lotta fancied she had received some sort of permission to tell him about it now.