h business this time--must
go up and look over the whole of the line. Meanwhile his wife and
children at home looked after the farm, or left it to look after
itself. Isak was sick and tired of Brede's visits, and went out of the
room when he came; then Inger and Brede would sit talking heartily
together. What could they have to talk about? Brede often went down to
the village, and had always some news to tell of the great folk there;
Inger, on the other hand, could always draw upon her famous journey to
Trondhjem and her stay there. She had grown talkative in the years she
had been away, and was always ready to gossip with any one. No, she
was no longer the same straightforward, simple Inger of the old days.

Girls and women came up continually to Sellanraa to have a piece of
work cut out, or a long hem put through the machine in a moment, and
Inger entertained them well. Oline too came again, couldn't help it,
belike; came both spring and autumn; fair-spoken, soft as butter, and
thoroughly false. "Just looked along to see how things are with you,"
she said each time. "And I've been longing so for a sight of the lads,
I'm that fond of them, the little angels they were. Ay, they're big
fellows now, but it's strange ... I can't forget the time when they
were small and I had them in my care. And here's you building and
building again, and making a whole town of the place. Going to have
a bell to ring, maybe, at the roof of the barn, same as at the
parsonage?"

Once Oline came and brought another woman with her, and the pair of
them and Inger had a nice day together. The more Inger had sitting
round her, the better she worked at her sewing and cutting out, making
a show of it, waving her scissors and swinging the iron. It reminded
her of the place where she had learned it all--there was always many
of them in the workrooms there. Inger made no secret of where she had
got her knowledge and all her art from; it was from Trondhjem. It
almost appeared as if she had not been in prison at all, in the
ordinary way, but at school, in an institute, where one could learn to
sew and weave and write, and do dressing and dyeing--all that she had
learned in Trondhjem. She spoke of the place as of a home; there were
so many people she knew there, superintendents and forewomen and
attendants, it had been dull and empty to come back here again, and
hard to find herself altogether cut off from the life and society
she had been accustomed t