The grandmother felt like saying: "If you let yourself go to ruin, you'll surely harm the child--" but checked herself. When a man is getting back into the right road, it isn't well to keep preaching at him. Let him go on quietly in his own way, or else he will lose all pleasure in it.--Thus thought the grandmother to herself, and, although she had already opened her lips to speak, she swallowed her words.
Hansei looked about him, with an unsteady glance, and said:
"Mother-in-law, you were going to say something else."
"There's no need of saying everything. But yes!--you lower yourself when you let Zenza bring messages to you. I noticed the woodcutter making a queer face when he saw that Zenza was allowed to enter our house. Don't go to the Windenreuthe; the place has a bad name, and it does no one credit to go there. If you do want to go hunting, and have bought yourself a gun, you can give a boy a penny to go there and get it for you."
"Yes, indeed," thought Hansei, smiling, "grandmother's right; but one needn't tell all one's thoughts."
"I'm going into the forest now. I want to be about when they load up my wood."
He took his hat and mountain-staff, donned his hunter's pouch and provided himself with a piece of bread. The grandmother, carrying the child on her arm, accompanied him as far as the cherry-tree, from which the withered leaves were already beginning to fall.
Hansei went into the forest; but, as soon as he was out of sight, he turned about and took the road that led to Windenreuthe.
He felt quite strangely while on his way. He had never before known that he breathed so hard and was so easily frightened. He was terrified by every sound, by the nutpecker flying from the tree, the chattering magpie, the hooting hawk-owl on the rocky ridge, and the bellowing cow in the meadow.
"I oughtn't to go, and I won't go," he exclaimed, bringing his staff down with such force that the pointed ferrule struck sparks from the stones in the road, and yet he went on.