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Page 13
Suddenly she seemed to be shaken by some unseen force; she covered
her face with her hands and sank down upon the stone step. Ingmar
could hear her sobs from where he stood.
Presently he went over to her, and waited. She was crying so hard
that she seemed deaf to every other sound; and he had to stand
there a long time. At last he said:
"Don't cry like that, Brita!"
She looked up. "O God in Heaven!" she exclaimed, "are you here?"
Instantly all that she had done to him flashed across her mind--and
what it must have cost him to come. With a cry of joy she threw her
arms around his neck and began to sob again.
"How I have longed that you might come!" she said.
Ingmar's heart began to beat faster at the thought of her being so
pleased with him. "Why, Brita, have you really been longing for
me?" he said, quite moved.
"I have wanted so much to ask your forgiveness."
Ingmar drew himself up to his full height and said very coldly:
"There will be plenty of time for that I don't think we ought to
stop here any longer."
"No, this is no place to stop at," she answered meekly.
"I have put up at L�vberg's," he said as they walked along the
road.
"That's where my trunk is."
"I have seen it there," said Ingmar. "It's too big for the back of
the cart, so it will have to be left there till we can send for
it."
Brita stopped and looked up at him. This was the first time he had
intimated that he meant to take her home.
"I had a letter from father to-day. He says that you also think
that I ought to go to America."
"I thought there was no harm in our having a second choice. It
wasn't so certain that you would care to come back with me."
She noticed that he said nothing about wanting her to come, but
maybe it was because he did not wish to force himself upon her a
second time. She grew very reluctant. It couldn't be an enviable
task to take one of her kind to the Ingmar Farm. Then something
seemed to say:
"Tell him that you will go to America; it is the only service you
can render him. Tell him that, tell him that!" urged something
within her. And while this thought was still in her mind she heard
some one say: "I'm afraid that I am not strong enough to go to
America. They tell me that you have to work very hard over there."
It was as if another had spoken, and not she herself.
"So they say," Ingmar said indifferently.
She was ashamed of her weakness and thought of how only that
morning she had told the prison chaplain that she was going out
into the world a new and a better woman. Thoroughly displeased with
herself, she walked silently for some time, wondering how she
should take back her words. But as soon as she tried to speak, she
was held back by the thought that if he still cared for her it
would be the basest kind of ingratitude to repulse him again. "If I
could only read his thoughts!" she said herself.
Presently she stopped and leaned against a wall. "All this noise
and the sight of so many people makes my bead go round," she said.
He put out his hand, which she took; then they went along, hand in
hand. Ingmar was thinking, "Now we look like sweethearts." All the
same he wondered how it would be when he got home, how his mother
and the rest of the folks would take it.
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