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Katrina lay on the bed in the little but at Ruffluck Croft, the pallor of death on her face, her eyes closed. It looked as if the end had already come. But the instant Glory Goldie reached her bedside and stood patting her hand, she opened her eyes and began to speak. "Jan wants me with him," she said, with great effort. "He doesn't hold it against me that I deserted him." Glory Goldie started.
Yet she could not help wondering how long it would be before Jan's intense yearning for Glory Goldie subsided. "Perhaps he'll be lying round like this till Christmas!" she thought. "Or possibly the whole winter?" And this might have been the case, too, had not the old seine-maker dropped in at Ruffluck one evening and been asked to stay for coffee.
"Until now I had always thought that I was the only one in this parish who knew what it was to yearn; but now I see that I have found my master." The little girl of Ruffluck had been away fully thirteen months, yet Jan had not betrayed by so much as a word that he had any knowledge of the great thing that had come to her. He had vowed to himself never to speak of this until Glory Goldie's return.
"The fact is," he began, "a couple of days ago I received a communication from a person who calls herself Glory Goldie Sunnycastle, daughter of Jan of Ruffluck, in which she says she left home some months ago to try to earn two-hundred rix-dollars, which sum her parents have to pay to Lars Gunnarson of Falla on the first day of October in order to obtain full rights of ownership to the land on which their hut stands."
When the Ruffluck family came home from church the Sunday the dean had spoken so beautifully to Glory Goldie they found two men perched on their fence, close to the gate. One of the men was Lars Gunnarson, who had become master of Falla after Eric's death, the other was a clerk from the store down at Broby, where Katrina bought her coffee and sugar.
She felt herself going headlong and barely had time to think: "I'm falling with the child; it will be killed and I'll be heartbroken for life," when a strong hand seized and steadied her. Looking round she saw that her rescuer was Jan Anderson of Ruffluck, who had lingered in the hallway as if knowing he would be needed there.
The christening passed off as it should without the slightest occasion for a mishap, and Jan of Ruffluck had nothing for his intrusion. Just before the close of the service he opened the door and quietly slipped out again, into the hallway. He saw of course that everything seemed to go quite smoothly and nicely without his help.
The teacher patted the little girl on the head. The people all smiled, but at the same time they were touched. Glory Goldie sat looking down, not knowing what she should do with herself; but Jan of Ruffluck felt as happy as a king, for it had suddenly become clear to him that the little girl had been his the whole time. It was strange about the little girl of Ruffluck and her father!
When the door to the pastor's study swung open and Jan of Ruffluck in his soiled workaday clothes calmly shuffled into the room, just after the pastor had begun the service and there was no way of driving him out, the godparents swore to themselves that once they were home they would take him severely to task for his unseemly behaviour.
When Jan of Ruffluck walked home from church the Sunday he had appeared there for the first time in his royal regalia, he turned in on the old forest road. It was a warm sunny day and, as he went up the hill, he heard the music of the spruces so plainly that it astonished him. Never had spruce trees sung like that! It struck him that he ought to find out why they were so loud-voiced just to-day.
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