In their grandfather’s house the life that had to be suppressed at home got leave to expand.  Here there was singing and dancing and play and story-telling.  So the sisters’ young days passed between devotion to their melancholy parents in the quiet house, and the glad life they were allowed to take part in at their grandfather’s.  The families lived in perfect understanding.  It was the parents who told them to go to the old people and enjoy themselves, and the old people who told them to go back again, “and be sure to be good girls.”

When a girl between the age of twelve and sixteen takes a sister between seven and eleven into her full confidence, the confidence is rewarded by great devotion.  But the little one is apt to become too old for her years.  This happened with Beret, while Mildrid only gained by being forbearing and kind and sympathetic—­and she made her parents and grandparents happy.

There is no more to tell till Mildrid was in her fifteenth year; then old Knut died, suddenly and easily.  There seemed almost no time between the day when he sat joking in the chimney-corner and the day when he lay in his coffin.

After this, grandmother’s greatest pleasure was to have Mildrid sitting on a stool at her feet, as she had done ever since she was a little child, and to tell her stories about Knut, or else to get her to hum the Bridal March.  As Astrid sat listening to it, she saw Knut’s handsome dark head as she used to see it in her young days; she followed him out to the mountain-side, where he blew the March on his herd-boy’s horn, she drove to church by his side—­all his brightness and cleverness lived again for her!

But in Mildrid’s soul a new feeling began to stir.  Whilst she sat and sang for grandmother, she asked herself:  “Will it ever be played for me?” The thought grew upon her, the March spoke to her of such radiant happiness.  She saw a bride’s crown glittering in its sunshine, and a long, bright future beyond that.  Sixteen—­and she asked herself:  “Shall I, shall I ever have some one sitting beside me, with the Bridal March shining in his eyes?  Only think, if father and mother were one day to drive with me in such a procession, with the people greeting us on every side, on to the house where mother was jeered at that day, past Ole Haugen’s flower-covered grave, up to the altar, in a glory of happiness!  Think what it would be if I could give father and mother that consolation!” And the child’s heart swelled, imagining all this to herself, swelled with pride and with devotion to those dear parents who had suffered so much.

These were the first thoughts that she did not confide to Beret.  Soon there were more.  Beret, who was now eleven, noticed that she was left more to herself, but did not understand that she was being gradually shut out from Mildrid’s confidence, till she saw another taken into her place.  This was Inga, from the neighbouring farm, a girl of eighteen, their own cousin, newly betrothed.  When Mildrid and Inga walked about in the fields, whispering and laughing, with their arms round each other, as girls love to go, poor Beret would throw herself down and cry with jealousy.