How strangely the threads of life were woven! Well, after all, why not? It mattered little—nothing really mattered. What would the child be like? he wondered. Boy or girl? And what was the mother like? Again, it did not matter much.
Anyhow, this must be the last phase—the final stage of his life. It must end as it had begun—at Borg. Like his forefathers, he was fated to be a link in a chain, rather than an individual.
Only it meant now that all his dreams of something greater and better were at an end.
He glanced up and saw that it was light outside; the moon had come out from behind a hill. Moved by a sudden impulse, he took his hat and coat and went out.
The sky was cloudy, semi-darkness and bright moonlight alternating in quick succession; the earth looked cold and forbidding under a heavy frost, with the streams showing up as dark lines through the white.
Ormarr took a path he knew, leading to Borgara, where as a lad he had guarded the wool by night. Leaning against a rock, he stood, letting thoughts and fancies play through his mind at random. The happenings of the day, the revelations he had heard, seemed more like a dream than any reality.
Runa lay wakeful long through the night. Ormarr’s unexpected return had thrown her into a state of confused emotion. The simultaneous arrival of Ketill seemed but of minor importance, though why this should be so, she could not have told herself.
She remembered Ormarr from his last visit home, and how she had felt drawn to him at the time. He, on the other hand, had not paid much attention to her, and was doubtless unaware of the impression he had made. To her, he was the greatest and best, the most wonderful of men; an ideal, inaccessible, but nevertheless to be worshipped.
Then he had gone away—vanished as suddenly as he had come, to live thenceforward only as a dream in her heart. And she was firmly convinced that he had never given her a thought. In this, as a matter of fact, she was right.
On learning of his arrival now, she had tried in every way to avoid him, to conceal herself from him. All the others might know, but Ormarr—no, that was too cruel. And now—he would learn it soon enough. His father would tell him, and he would know what she was—the very thought of it made her shudder. She was not what she appeared to be; she was nothing. She hated Ketill, and wished herself dead.