Once as they sat thus and Lady Aashild told of these things, there slipped from Kristin’s lips a thought she had often had in mind:
“Methinks it is strange you can be so glad at all times, you who have been used to—” she broke off and grew red.
Lady Aashild looked down at the child with a smile:
“Mean you because I am parted from all that now?” She laughed quietly, and said: “I have had my happy time, Kristin, and I am not so foolish as to murmur, if now, since I have drunk up my wine and beer, I have to put up with skimmed milk and sour. Good days may last long if one lives wisely and deals warily with what one has; all wise folk know that, and ’tis therefore, I trow, that wise folk must rest content with good days—for the best days of all cost very dear. In this world they call him a fool who wastes his heritage that he may make merry in the days of his youth. As to that each man may deem as he lists. But that man only do I call a fool and a very dolt who rues his bargain after it is made; and twice a simpleton and a fool of fools is he who thinks to see more of his boon-companions after his heritage is gone—”
“—Is there aught amiss with Ulvhild?” she called gently across to Ragnfrid, who had made a sharp movement where she sat by the child’s bed.
“Nay, she sleeps well,” said the child’s mother and came over to Lady Aashild and Kristin at the hearth. Her hands on the pole of the smoke-vent, she stood and looked down into Lady Aashild’s face.
“Kristin doth not understand such things,” she said.
“No,” answered the Lady. “But she learned her prayers, too, I doubt not, before she understood them. The times when we need prayers or counsel, we are little like to be in a mood to learn, nor yet to understand.”
Ragnfrid drew her dark eyebrows together thoughtfully. At such times her bright, deep-set eyes looked like barns below a dark-wooded hillside, so Kristin had often thought when she was little—or so she had heard others say. Lady Aashild looked at Ragnfrid with her little half-smile, and the mother seated herself upon the edge of the hearth, and taking a twig, stuck it into the embers.
“But he who has wasted his heritage upon the sorriest goods—and thereafter beholds a treasure he would gladly give his life to own—think you not he must rue bitterly his own folly?”