They parted with many expressions of love and friendship, and the following day a messenger came and handed to Sigurd a message written in mystic runes. It was from his cousins, who had written it on their way home. These magic words were: “With best love, from your broken-hearted cousins!” and a flush of joy overspread his face when he read this loving message. He immediately sent a messenger to them with another message, telling of his lonely feelings.
Sigurd felt utterly wretched after the departure of his two cousins, though they were to meet again. A feeling of intense loneliness came over him; all that was bright and cheerful in the island had gone; the wind moaned; the waves, as they struck the shores, seemed to sing mournfully in his ears, “Thy three cousins are gone, the rocky cliffs will see them no more.” He even dreaded to pass the skemma where they had stayed. No maiden could cheer him, for in his eyes none were so lovely and accomplished as Thorana, Ragnild, and Thordis.
He whiled away the time by writing on birch bark a saga, in which he recounted all that had happened on the island. Finally he concluded to depart, and after sailing a few days he came to a burg where a foster-brother by the name of Thorkel and he had been brought up together. But Thorkel had been dead for several years. Sigurd wanted to see his grave, and, after landing and telling his errand to the people, he went towards the mound where Thorkel and his wife lay silently side by side. They had been married but a short time ere Skuld snapped asunder the thread that measured the days of their lives. He ascended the mound and murmured to himself, “Here Thorkel and his wife lie. The thinking minds that guided and moved their actions during their lives have left them. Helpless, motionless, and without life they sleep.”
Looking up, he saw a butterfly of brilliant colors, with wings of gold and rainbow tints, full of life, going merrily from one flower to another, drinking of their nectar.
Whilst watching his joyous course, Sigurd exclaimed musingly: “All life is ephemeral! Man and woman, like this butterfly and the flower, are but the creatures of a day in the immensity of time and in the world which the gods have made. What a beautiful life is that of the butterfly! He lives in the air; his life is that of love and immortality. He spends his days in caressing and kissing flowers, and becomes intoxicated with their sweetness. Like love, he feeds on love. As soon as he has fulfilled his destiny, and filled brimful the cup of love and drunk it, he dies as a brilliant meteor that burst into life for an instant, like the twinkling of a star that never returns. Thus the flower is born to show her tempting beauty, her sweetness, and intoxicating nectar to the butterfly. The flower was created for the butterfly, and the butterfly for the flower; so were man and woman created for one another, and to love each other, and, like love, their minds are immortal. Short is the life of the butterfly and of the flower, but their existence in the immensity of time is apparently not shorter than that of man. If the lives of the butterfly and the flower are ephemeral, so also is the life of man. In the immensity of time since the ‘Great Void,’ the lives of all created things appear to the gods of the same duration. Man is born, ushered into the present, and then into the future, and thenceforth belongs to the past. We are tossed,” said Sigurd, “on the sea of life, like a rudderless ship, and we sail from day to day towards the unknown called by us the future, not knowing where we are going, nor how the Nornir have shaped our lives; always hoping and hoping for something we have not been able to grasp.”