"

"What good?"

"Ay, that's what I said."

"What good Os-Anders ...?"

"Ay, since I'm to give him cheeses in return."

Oline has had time to think, and has her answer ready now.

"Well, now, I wouldn't have thought it of you, Isak, that I wouldn't.
Was it me, pray, that first began with Os-Anders? I wish I may never
move alive from this spot if I ever so much as spoke his name."

Brilliant success for Oline. Isak has to give in, as he has done many
a time before.

But Oline had more to say. "And if you mean I'm to go here clean
barefoot, with the winter coming on and all, and never own the like
of a pair of shoes, why, you'll please to say so. I said a word of it
three and four weeks gone, that I needed shoes, but never sign of a
shoe to this day, and here I am."

Said Isak: "What's wrong with your pattens, then, that you can't use
them?"

"What's wrong with them?" repeats Oline, all unprepared.

"Ay, that's what I'd like to know."

"With my pattens?"

"Ay."

"Well ... and me carding and spinning, and tending cattle and sheep
and all, looking after children here--have you nothing to say to that?
I'd like to know; that wife of yours that's in prison for her deeds,
did you let her go barefoot in the snow?"

"She wore her pattens," said Isak. "And for going to church and
visiting and the like, why, rough hide was good enough for her."

"Ay, and all the finer for it, no doubt."

"Ay, that she was. And when she did wear her hide shoes in summer, she
did but stuff a wisp of grass in them, and never no more. But you--you
must wear stockings in your shoes all the year round."

Said Oline: "As for that, I'll wear out my pattens in time, no doubt.
I'd no thought there was any such haste to wear out good pattens all
at once." She spake softly and gently, but with half-closed eyes, the
same sly Oline as ever. "And as for Inger," said she, "the changeling,
as we called her, she went about with children of mine and learned
both this and that, for years she did. And this is what we get for
it. Because I've a daughter that lives in Bergen and wears a hat,
I suppose that's what Inger must be gone away south for; gone to
Trondhjem to buy a hat, he he!"

Isak got up to leave the room. But Oline had opened her heart now,
unlocked the store of blackness within; ay, she gave out rays of
darkness, did Oline. Thank Heaven, none of her children had their
faces slit like a fire-breathing dragon, so to speak; but they w