It was a mournful bridal procession that now moved on towards the church.  The rain allowed of the bride and bridegroom hiding their faces from the curiosity of the onlookers till they got inside; but they felt that they were running the gauntlet, and they felt too that their own friends were annoyed at being laughed at as part of such a foolish procession.

The grave of the famous fiddler, Ole Haugen, lay close by the church-door.  Without saying much about it, the family had always tended it, and a new head-board had been put up when the old one had rotted away below.  The upper part of it was in the shape of a wheel, as Ole himself had desired.  The grave was in a sunny spot, and was thickly overgrown with wild flowers.  Every churchgoer that had ever stood by it had heard from some one or other how a botanist in government pay, making a collection of the plants and flowers of the valley and the mountains round about, had found flowers on that grave that did not grow anywhere else in the neighbourhood.  And the peasants, who as a rule cared little about what they called “weeds,” took pride in these particular ones—­a pride mixed with curiosity and even awe.  Some of the flowers were remarkably beautiful.  But as the bridal pair passed the grave, Endrid, who was holding Randi’s hand, felt that she shivered; immediately she began to cry again, walked crying into the church, and was led crying to her place.  No bride within the memory of man had made such an entrance into that church.

She felt as she sat there that all this was helping to confirm the report that she had been sold.  The thought of the shame she was bringing on her parents made her turn cold, and for a little she was able to stop crying.  But at the altar she was moved again by some word of the priest’s, and immediately the thought of all she had gone through that day came over her; and for the moment she had the feeling that never, no, never again, could she look people in the face, and least of all her own father and mother.

Things got no better as the day went on.  She was not able to sit with the guests at the dinner-table; in the evening she was half coaxed, half forced to appear at supper, but she spoiled every one’s pleasure, and had to be taken away to bed.  The wedding festivities, that were to have gone on for several days, ended that evening.  It was given out that the bride was ill.

Though neither those who said this nor those who heard it believed it, it was only too true.  She was really ill, and she did not soon recover.  One consequence of this was that their first child was sickly.  The parents were not the less devoted to it from understanding that they themselves were to a certain extent the cause of its suffering.  They never left that child.  They never went to church, for they had got shy of people.  For two years God gave them the joy of the child, and then He took it from them.