Later in the evening, when he and Katharine were sitting alone near the great hay-barn, Katharine spoke of Knutty.
"She is the dearest old woman I have ever met," she said warmly. "I don't wonder that you all love her."
"I can never tell you what she has been to me," he answered. "It was always a great grief to me that——" He broke off.
"It was a great grief to me that——"
Again he broke off. He was trying to speak of Knutty's indifference to Marianne; and even this was too hard for him to say. Up in the mountains, he had felt that it would be easy for him to tell Katharine everything that he had in his heart, beginning with the story of Marianne and Marianne's death, and ending with himself and his love for her. But now that he was near her, he could say nothing about his own personal life and inner feelings. He could only bend forward and scratch a hole in the ground with his stick. Katharine remembered how Knutty had spoken of his "beginnings" and "breakings off," and she said:
"Knutty understands you through and through, Professor Thornton. Doesn't she?"
"Yes," he answered simply. "But why should you say that just now?"
"Oh, I don't know," Katharine answered. "I was thinking of her, and it came into my head. And I was so touched by her grief when she feared that she—we—had lost you."
"I do not know what she and the boy would have done without you," he said, still working with that stick.
Katharine was silent.