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There he sat dark and mighty, and Jofrid had a faint, indistinct idea that he was an image of something which was in herself and in all men, of something which was buried in far-away centuries, covered by many stones, and still not dead. She saw him, the old king, sitting deep in the human heart. Over its barren field he spread his wide king's mantle.
The peasant had lately lost his wife, and she had left behind her a child six months old. He asked Tönne and Jofrid to take his son as a foster-child. "The child is very dear to me," he said, "therefore I give it to you, for you are good people." They had no children of their own, so that it seemed very fitting for them to take it. They accepted it too without hesitation.
One day Tönne took Jofrid to one of the clefts, where he had hidden his timber. He pulled aside the branches and moss and showed her the squared beams. "That was to have been mother's house," he said. The young girl was strangely slow in understanding a young man's thoughts. When he showed her his mother's logs she ought to have understood, but she did not understand.
Wherever Jofrid went during those days, the thought never left her that a house was being built for her there. A home was being prepared for her upon the heath. And she knew that if she did not enter there as mistress, the bear and the fox would make it their home. For she knew Tönne well enough to understand that if he found he had worked in vain, he would never move into the new house.
One can go by them twenty times before one sees that it is a soft animal body one has taken for hard wood. But Jofrid could no longer be mistaken. It was the old King Atle himself sitting there. She stood in the doorway, shaded her eyes with her hand, and looked right into his stony face. He had very small, oblique eyes under a dome-like brow, a broad nose and a long beard.
Then the man said: "I am like the man who puts cushions in his bed so soft that he sinks down to the hard bottom. I wished to care too well for my son, and look, now he is dead!" And he was heart-broken. At his words Jofrid began to weep bitterly. "Would to God that you had not left your son with us!" she said. "We were too poor. He could not get what he needed with us."
It happened that Jofrid had expended much hard work in procuring a kind of dower for herself. With skilful hands she had woven bright colored fabrics, such as are used to adorn a room, and she wanted to put them up in her own home, when she got one. Now she wondered how those cloths would look here. She wished she could try them in the new house.
Tönne had not moved in his old furniture. There was nothing but a new table and a bench, over which an elk skin was thrown. As soon as Jofrid had crossed the threshold, she felt the pleasant cosiness of home surrounding her. She was happy and content while she stood there, but to leave it seemed to her as hard as to go away and serve strangers.
"We will give ourselves as slaves into his power, if he is not content with less." At these words Jofrid was seized by cold despair, and she hated Tönne from the depths of her soul. Everything she would lose appeared so plainly to her, freedom, for which her ancestors had ventured their lives, the house, her comforts, honor and happiness.
Still she looked first to see that old King Atle had again become a pile of stones. Tönne and Jofrid lived happily for many years. They earned a good reputation. "They are good," people said. "See how they stand by one another, see how they work together, see how one cannot live apart from the other!" Tönne grew stronger, more enduring and less heavy-witted every day.
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