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"Is this, perchance, the Princess Kunigunde, the heir to the throne of my good friend, King Bjorn the Victorious?" he asked, with a magnificent air, seizing the trembling little girl by the wrist. "Nay," Gunbjor answered, as soon as she could find her voice, "this is the Deacon's Maggie, as is going to the saeter with me to spend Sunday."
The next evening when the milking was done, and the cattle were gathered within the saeter enclosure, Brita was again sitting on the large stone, looking out over the valley. She felt a kind of companionship with the people when she saw the smoke whirling up from their chimneys, and she could guess what they were going to have for supper.
I thought I would have to wait until father came this evening to get home. You'll row me across, won't you?" "Why, certainly; but I thought you had gone to the saeter to stay, at least a week." "Yes, but but, I've come home again, you see." "Yes, I see," and he looked oddly at her. He had also seen Hr. Bogstad set out for the mountains two days before, and now he wondered.
"You make too much of me. Hakon would not heed so small a matter. No, take me to Norway, and I will find my cousins who are in the south, and there I may be welcome. At least, I shall be no burden to them, and they are folk who live on their own land. It will be the quiet life of the homestead and the saeter which I love."
What do you think, Hr. Bogstad?" As the girl caught sight of the new arrival she started and the color came to her face. He went up to her. "How are you, Signe?" he said. "How do you like life on a saeter?" "Well, I hardly know," she said, seemingly quite embarrassed. "Oh, I'll tell you," broke in the busy Hansine, as she came with a pail full of salt.
A little hut, standing on a patch of green, with split-stick fence and a long cow-house of rough planks it must be a saeter! And listen isn't that a girl singing? Peer slipped softly through the gate and stood listening against the wall of the byre. "Shap, shap, shap," went the streams of milk against the pail. It must be a fairy sitting milking in there.
"Forgive me if I am telling you what you know, but a 'saeter' is the name given to the upland pastures to which, during the summer, are sent the cattle, generally under the charge of one or more of the maids. Here for three months these girls will live in their lonely huts, entirely shut off from the world. Customs change little in this land.
On the evening of the first day's search they put up at a saeter or mountain chalet. Here they met a young man named Tollef Morud, who had once been a groom at John Garvestad's.
Bjarne soon noticed her distraction, but, of course, never suspected the cause. Before he left her, he asked her if she did not find it too lonely on the saeter, and if it would not be well if he sent her one of the maids for a companion. She hastened to assure him that that was quite unnecessary; the cattle-boy who was there to help her was all the company she wanted.
Much encouraged by this thought, she stooped over him and kissed him; then took his hand and trudged along over logs and stones, through juniper and bramble bushes. "Mamma," said little Hans, "where are you going?" "I am going to the saeter," she answered; "where you have wanted so often to go." "Then why don't you follow the cows? They are going there too."
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