und him. At such times Aasa could talk and
jest almost like other girls, and her mother, to whom "other girls"
represented the ideal of womanly perfection, would send significant
glances, full of hope and encouragement, over to Lage, and he would
quietly nod in return, as if to say that he entirely agreed with her.
Then Elsie had bright visions of wooers and thrifty housewives, and even
Lage dreamed of seeing the ancient honor of the family re-established.
All depended on Aasa. She was the last of the mighty race. But when
summer came, the bright visions fled; and the spring winds, which to
others bring life and joy, to Kvaerk brought nothing but sorrow. No
sooner had the mountain brooks begun to swell, than Aasa began to laugh
and to weep; and when the first birches budded up in the glens, she
could no longer be kept at home. Prayers and threats were equally
useless. From early dawn until evening she would roam about in forests
and fields, and when late at night she stole into the room and slipped
away into some corner, Lage drew a deep sigh and thought of the old
tradition.

Aasa was nineteen years old before she had a single wooer. But when she
was least expecting it, the wooer came to her.

It was late one summer night; the young maiden was sitting on the brink
of the ravine, pondering on the old legend and peering down into the
deep below. It was not the first time she had found her way hither,
where but seldom a human foot had dared to tread. To her every alder and
bramble-bush, that clothed the naked wall of the rock, were as familiar
as were the knots and veins in the ceiling of the chamber where from
her childhood she had slept; and as she sat there on the brink of the
precipice, the late summer sun threw its red lustre upon her and upon
the fogs that came drifting up from the deep. With her eyes she followed
the drifting masses of fog, and wondered, as they rose higher and
higher, when they would reach her; in her fancy she saw herself dancing
over the wide expanse of heaven, clad in the sun-gilded evening fogs;
and Saint Olaf, the great and holy king, came riding to meet her,
mounted on a flaming steed made of the glory of a thousand sunsets; then
Saint Olaf took her hand and lifted her up, and she sat with him on the
flaming steed: but the fog lingered in the deep below, and as it rose
it spread like a thin, half-invisible gauze over the forests and the
fields, and at last vanished into the infinite space.