d laughed. "Out there on the rocks with father and mother!
Father is a wrecker and mother is a witch. No one will come to us."

"Is your mother a witch?"

"She is," answered Tord, quite untroubled. "In stormy weather she
rides out on a seal to meet the ships over which the waves are
washing, and those who are carried overboard are hers."

"What does she do with them?" asked Berg.

"Oh, a witch always needs corpses. She makes ointments out of them,
or perhaps she eats them. On moonlight nights she sits in the surf,
where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her. They say that
she sits and searches for shipwrecked children's fingers and eyes."

"That is awful," said Berg.

The boy answered with infinite assurance: "That would be awful in
others, but not in witches. They have to do so."

Berg Rese found that he had here come upon a new way of regarding
the world and things.

"Do thieves have to steal, as witches have to use witchcraft?" he
asked sharply.

"Yes, of course," answered the boy; "every one has to do what he is
destined to do." But then he added, with a cautious smile: "There
are thieves also who have never stolen."

"Say out what you mean," said Berg.

The boy continued with his mysterious smile, proud at being an
unsolvable riddle: "It is like speaking of birds who do not fly, to
talk of thieves who do not steal."

Berg Rese pretended to be stupid in order to find out what he
wanted. "No one can be called a thief without having stolen," he
said.

"No; but," said the boy, and pressed his lips together as if to
keep in the words, "but if some one had a father who stole," he
hinted after a while.

"One inherits money and lands," replied Berg Rese, "but no one
bears the name of thief if he has not himself earned it."

Tord laughed quietly. "But if somebody has a mother who begs and
prays him to take his father's crime on him. But if such a one
cheats the hangman and escapes to the woods. But if some one is
made an outlaw for a fish-net which he has never seen."

Berg Rese struck the stone table with his clenched fist. He was
angry. This fair young man had thrown away his whole life. He could
never win love, nor riches, nor esteem after that. The wretched
striving for food and clothes was all which was left him. And the
fool had let him, Berg Rese, go on despising one who was innocent.
He rebuked him with stern words, but Tord was not even as afraid as
a sick child is of its mother, when s