Page:Selma Lagerlöf - Mårbacka (1924).djvu/114

None moved or said a word, none so much as raised his eyes.

"I have wept for the lad every day since he went away," continued the poor woman. "If he's there among ye why doesn't he stand up and say so, for I shouldn't know him again."

Silence.

The woman slowly went her way. To the first person she met afterwards she related her experience.

"I thought until now I'd go out of my mind if my son did not come back," she said, "but now I thank my God that he's not among those skeletons!"

The militia-men rested a week at Mårbacka, and then went on, somewhat strengthened.

But they had left the bloody flux in their wake. Everyone on the place became desperately ill. All recovered save Grandmother's two little children, who were of too tender an age to resist the virulence of the sickness.

When the two children lay in their coffins. Grandmother said to herself: "If I had done like the others, if instead of harbouring those men I had driven them away with stones, my little ones would have been alive now."

But as that thought crossed her mind, she remembered her vision of that evening in the spring wherein the wolves carried off the children. "Our Lord is not to blame," she said. "He forewarned me." The loss of the children was not due to her act of mercy, but rather to her thoughtlessness in not having taken proper precautions to guard them against contagion.