To the folk of the Dale, waiting and waiting for the spring to deliver them, it seemed as though it would never come. The days grew long and light, and the steam-cloud from the melting snow lay on all the valley as long as the sun shone. But the cold still held the air, and there was no strength in the heat to overcome it. By night it froze hard—there was loud cracking from the ice, there were booming sounds from the distant fells; and the wolves howled and the fox barked down among the farms as at midwinter. Men stripped the bark from the trees for their cattle, but they dropped down dead in their stalls by scores. None could tell how all this was to end.
Kristin went out on such a day, when water was trickling in the ruts and the snow on the fields around glistened like silver. The snow-wreaths had been eaten away hollow on the side toward the sun, so that the fine ice-trellis of the snow-crust edges broke with a silver tinkle when her foot touched them. But everywhere, where the smallest shadow fell, the sharp cold held the air and the snow was hard.
She went upward towards the church—she knew not herself what she went to do, but something drew her there. Her father was there—some of the free-holders, guild-brothers, were to meet in the cloister-way, she knew.
Half-way up the hill she met the troop of farmers, coming down. Sira Eirik was with them. The men were all on foot; they walked stoopingly in a dark, shaggy knot, and spoke no word together. They gave back her greeting sullenly, as she went by them.
Kristin thought how far away the time was when every soul in the parish had been her friend. Like enough all men knew now that she was a bad daughter. Perhaps they knew yet more about her. It might well be that all believed now there had been some truth in the old talk about her and Arne and Bentein. It might be that she had fallen into the worst ill-fame. She held her head high and passed on toward the church.
The door stood ajar. It was cold in the church, yet was it as though a mild warmth streamed into her heart from the brown dusky hall with the high, upspringing pillars holding up the darkness under the roof-beams. There was no light on the altars, but a ray of sun shone in through a chink of the door and gleamed faintly back from the pictures and the holy vessels.
Far in before the altar of St. Thomas she saw her father kneeling with head bent forward on his folded hands, which held his cap crushed to his breast.
Shrinking back in fear and sadness, Kristin stole out and stood in the cloister-way, with her hands about two of its small pillars. Framed in the arch between them she saw Jörundgaard lying below, and behind her home the pale-blue haze that filled the valley. Where the river lay stretched through the country-side its ice and water sent out white sparkles in the sunshine. But the alder thickets along its bed were yellow-brown with blossom, even the pine-wood up by the church was tinged with spring green, and there was a piping and twittering and whistling of little birds in the grove near by. Aye, there had been bird-song like this each evening after the sun was down.
And she felt that the longing she thought must have been racked out of her long since, the longing in her body and her blood, was stirring now again, faintly and feebly, as about to waken from a winter sleep.
Lavrans Björgulfsön came out and locked the church-door behind him. He came and stood by his daughter, looking out through the arch next to her. She saw how the winter gone by had harrowed her father’s face. She understood not herself how she could touch now on what was between them, but the words seemed to rush out of themselves: