te flakes of snow came floating in,
showing white in the darkness.

Ditte's first thought was that it would be cold for Granny. She
closed the door and went towards the bed. Old Maren lay crouched
together among the untidy bedclothes. "Granny," called Ditte and
crying groped for the sunken face. "It's only me, dear little
Granny."

She took the old woman's face entreatingly between her thin
toil-worn hands, crying over it for a while; then undressed herself
and crept into bed beside her. She had once heard Granny say about
some one she had been called to: "There is nothing to be done for
him, he's quite cold!" And she was obsessed with that thought,
Granny must not be allowed to get cold, or she would have no Granny
left. She crept close to the body, and worn out by tears and
exhaustion soon fell asleep.

Towards morning she woke feeling cold; Granny was dead and cold.
Suddenly she understood the awfulness of it all, and hurrying into
her clothes, she fled.

She ran across the fields in the direction of home, but when she
reached the road leading to the sea, she went along it to Per
Nielsen's farm. There they picked her up, benumbed with misery.
"Granny's dead!" she broke out over and over again, looking from one
to the other with terror in her eyes. That was all they could get
out of her. When they proposed taking her home to the Crow's Nest,
she began to scream, so they put her to bed, to rest.

When she woke later in the day, Per Nielsen came in to her. "Well, I
suppose you'd better be thinking of getting home," said he. "I'll go
with you."

Ditte gazed at him with fear in her eyes.

"Are you afraid of your stepfather?" asked he. She did not answer.
The wife came in.

"I don't know what we're to do," said he, "she's afraid to go home.
The stepfather can't be very good to her."

Ditte turned sharply towards him. "I want to go home to Lars Peter,"
she said, sobbing.

CHAPTER XIX

ILL LUCK FOLLOWS THE RAVEN'S CALL

On receiving information of old Maren's death, four of her children
assembled at the hut on the Naze, to look after their own interests,
and watch that no-one ran off with anything. The other four on the
other side of the globe, could of course not be there.

There was no money--not as much as a farthing was to be found, in
spite of their searching, and the splitting up of the eiderdown--and
the house was mortgaged up to the hilt. They then agreed to give
Soerine and her husband wh