Up the white mountain road moves a man who often presses his hand to his breast pocket, as if to convince himself that he had not lost the dispatch.
In Landolin's house a light is still burning. Thoma sits at the table, and stares at the candle. Her features are changed by bitterness and pain, and the lips that once so sweetly smiled, so warmly kissed, are tightly compressed. Will those lips ever smile again; ever kiss again?
Her mother reclines at the open window, and looks out into the night.
"Mother," said Thoma, "you must go to sleep. It is past midnight; and the doctor thought that the trial would scarcely be finished in one day."
The mother barely turned her head, and then looked out again. Is Cushion-Kate awake, too, thought she.
Yes, she was awake, but she could not afford a light. Perhaps, at the same moment, she was thinking of Landolin's wife. "She has not deserved such misery; but neither have I; and I have no one else; nothing but this gnawing sorrow."
Suddenly Cushion-Kate straightened herself. She heard footsteps.
"Have you brought anything for me?" she asked the frightened messenger.
"No! nothing for you."
"For whom then?"