"I can't forget the beautiful letter she wrote me when her little daughter was born. I was so glad. And she wanted me to come to her then and help her with the little one. But I couldn't leave them at home, and I didn't really want to, I suppose. It seemed hard to go and stay with Sigrun as a maid, and I was afraid of her husband, too. Anyhow, I've regretted it since, for when the child died I couldn't help thinking it might have lived if I had been there helping Sigrun as she asked. And perhaps she thinks so too. I've never heard a word from her since then."
She felt a weight at her heart. Perhaps, after all, the long journey would come to nothing.
She strove to repress her anxiety. "What will be, must be," she told herself. "Day after day I heard voices and had warnings telling me to go. I had no peace nor rest to work things out. 'Sigrun, Sigrun, first of all,' something was always saying, when I was trying to find out about the war and the millennium. And then, when father and mother died, and my brother took over the place and gave me the wretched little cellar room to live in—why shouldn't I start out and see if she needed me? There, Lotta Hedman, now pull yourself together. At least, you are seeing something of the world, and not wasting your money all to nothing."
As she was thus endeavouring to raise her drooping courage, the driver lifted his whip and pointed to a dark, pointed church-tower rising from a clump of trees.
"There's the church already," he said. "We're nearly there now."
Directly after, the road began to slope down into a narrow valley, with a winding river at the bottom, some farms and houses and fields, groups of trees, and a little wooden church.
But before they reached the place, the driver lifted his whip again.
"Bless me, but I do believe it's Mistress from the parsonage herself going down the road, ahead there."
At his words Lotta Hedman felt the weight at her heart almost stifling her. She could hardly breathe, and all her courage was gone in a moment.
"Oh, why ever did I come like this?" she asked herself. "Perhaps she won't even remember me. What ever made me set off on this wild adventure? Perhaps, after all, only to be laughed at and treated with scorn."