He appeared to look over the pages of the latter with an interest that was intent and unfeigned.
But was it so?
Chapter Nine
I SHALL certainly not tell Molly one word about these latest developments,” Rosina said firmly to herself, and she remade the resolution not once but a hundred times during the train ride of that early Wednesday morning. She was too tired from excess of emotion, and no balance of much-needed sleep, to feel anything but unhappy over the termination of the preceding evening.
Everything was over now, and the only glory to be reaped in any direction would be the dignified way in which Molly should be kept in ignorance of all that had occurred.
Outside, the freshness of a Suabian morning lay over valley and mountain. The country was beautiful with the charm of midsummer’s immediate promise, which spread over the fields of ripening grain and lost itself among the threading rivulets, or in the shadow of forest and mountain. The white-plastered farmhouses with the stable-door at one end, the house-door at the other, and the great sweep of straw-thatched roof sloping down over all, peeped out from among their surrounding fruit-trees. Old, old women knit peacefully under the shadow of the stone-bound well, and little, little children tumbled about their knees in the grass. Out in the garden at one side the boys and girls were busy gathering berries or vegetables for the market of next day. Yokes of oxen passed slowly to and fro upon the shaded roads, their high, two-wheeled carts loaded to the very top; beside a pond a maiden herded geese; upon a hill a boy lay sleeping, his sheep nibbling the herbage near by. It was all quaint and picturesque, and to the American eyes surpassing strange to see, but those two particular American eyes before which all the panorama was displayed, happened just then to be blind to everything except one vivid spirit-photograph, and grew moist each time that they pictured that afresh.
“No, I shall not tell Molly one word,” she repeated mentally; “I can’t tell her part,—I won’t tell her all,—so I just shan’t tell her anything,” and then she stared sightlessly out of the wide-open window, and knew not that it was the dregs of her own evaporated anger which veiled the sunlit landscape in a dull-gray mist.
The train came slowly in by the banks of the Bodensee, and halted at the Kaufhaus soon after eleven o’clock. The Kaufhaus is that delightful old building where Huss was tried before the great Council. Built for a warehouse, it is now again a warehouse, Huss and his heresy having been but a ripple on the tranquil centuries of its existence.