The next day Aasmund Björgulfsön set out with his wife and children to the manor of Gyrid’s kin in Hadeland. They had been scared by the talk of war; the folk about Galo still went in terror since Duke Eirik’s harrying of that countryside some years before. Aasmund’s old mother was so fearful, she was minded to seek shelter in Nonneseter—besides she was too weak to travel with the others. So Kristin was to stay at Skog with the old woman—she called her grandmother—till Aasmund came back from Hadeland.
About the midday hour, when the folk on the farm were resting, Kristin went to the loft-room where she slept. She had brought some clothes with her in a sheepskin bag, and now she changed her garments, humming to herself the while.
Her father had given her a dress of thick cotton stuff from the East, skyblue with a close pattern of red flowers; this she put on. She brushed and combed out her hair and bound it back from her face with a red silk ribbon, wound a red silk belt tightly about her waist and put Erlend’s rings upon her fingers; all the time she wondered if he would think her fair.
The two dogs that had been with Erlend in the forest had slept in the loft-room over night—she called them to go with her now. She stole out round the houses and took the same path as the day before up through the hill-pastures.
The field amid the forest lay lonely and silent in the burning midday sun; the pine woods that shut it in on all sides gave out a hot strong scent. The sun stung, and the blue sky seemed strangely near and close down upon the tree-tops.
Kristin sat down in the shade in the borders of the wood. She was not vexed that Erlend was not there; she was sure he would come, and it gave her an odd gladness to sit there alone a little and to be the first.
She listened to the low hum of tiny life above the yellow, scorched grass, pulled a few dry, spicy-scented flowers that she could reach without moving more than her hand, and rolled them between her fingers and smelt them—she sat with wide open eyes sunk in a kind of drowse.
She did not move when she heard a horse in the woods. The dogs growled and the hair on their necks bristled—then they bounded up over the meadow, barking and wagging their tails. Erlend sprang from his horse at the edge of the forest, let it go with a clap on its flank and ran down towards her with the dogs jumping about him. He caught their muzzles in his hands and came to her leading the two elk-grey, wolflike beasts. Kristin smiled and held out her hand without getting up.
Once, while she was looking at the dark head that lay in her lap, between her hands, something bygone flashed on her mind. It stood out, clear yet distant, as a homestead far away on a mountain slope may start to sight of a sudden from out dark clouds, when a sunbeam strikes it on a stormy day. And it was as though there welled up in her heart all the tenderness Arne Gyrdsön had once begged for while as yet she did not understand his words. With timid passion, she drew the man up to her and laid his head upon her breast, kissing him as if afraid he should be taken from her. And when she saw his head upon her arm, she felt as though she clasped a child—she hid his eyes with one of her hands and showered little kisses upon his mouth and cheek.