Book Two — Karin, Daughter Of Ingmar

Autumn at the schoolmaster's household. Mother Stina spots a familiar figure coming down the road: Karin Ingmarsson, stoop-shouldered, half-grown boy beside her. Tims Halvor is also at the table — the young shopkeeper who once courted Karin before her family decided he wasn't quite good enough. When he sees her coming he glances around for a way out, then sits still.

Karin's situation is grim. Her late husband Elof Ersson squandered every kroner they had deliberately, leaving the farm mortgaged to the point of loss. The Ingmar name — the most respected in the parish — is now attached to poverty. Tims Halvor had told her that refusing him would be "heaping shame upon me that will be hard to bear." Now the shame runs the other way.

Gertrude is present throughout, observing Ingmar and Karin with the complicated attention she gives everything. She is the schoolmaster's daughter: imaginative, proud, fond of Ingmar in a way she has not yet examined. The chapter begins to draw the threads that Book Two will pull tight: the Ingmarsson family's reduced circumstances, Karin's moral seriousness, Gertrude's unexamined feeling for Ingmar, and the religious movement waiting in the background.