but she saw him repeatedly thrust up his head, with its sparse covering of hair, and each time promptly withdraw it. This called off her thoughts, she did not want to see, and yet she saw, and there—just as all the others were deeply affected, many of them in tears—Petra was terrified at seeing Pedro rise up, eyes and mouth wide open and rigid, paralyzed with fear, and powerless to sit down or move away; for opposite him, drawn up to her full height, stood Gunlaug. Petra shuddered as she looked at her, for she was as white as the altar-cloth. Her curly black hair seemed to bristle, while her eyes suddenly acquired a repellent power, as though they would say: “Away from her! what would you with her!” He cowered on the bench beneath this look, and a moment later stole away from the church.
After this Petra found peace, and the further the service progressed the more thoroughly did she enter into it. And when she returned from the altar, after having taken her vow, and gazed through her tears at Ödegaard, as the one who was nearest all her good purposes, she vowed in her heart that she would never bring his trust in her to shame. Those faithful eyes, which so beamingly met hers, seemed to implore this of her; but after she had taken her
