“My Dami will give you three.”
“Oh, no,” said the boy, “he told my grandfather that he had not a penny.”
“Neither have I any at present, but I will remember it.”
She went quickly back into the house, and asked one of the maids to milk the cow in the evening, in case she did not get home in season, for she had to go out directly.
With her heart beating, sometimes in contempt at Dami, sometimes in sadness at his ill luck, then again in anger that he had come back; and then she reproached herself that she could meet her only brother with such emotions. She went through the fields and down the valley, to the Moosbrunnenwold. The way to Charcoal Mathew’s could not be missed, although it turned aside from the foot-path. The odor of the kiln-burner led infallibly to it.
How merrily the birds sing in the trees, she thought, and a sorrowful child of man wanders beneath them. How melancholy must it be for Dami to see all this again, and how hard it must be for him, if he has no other resource, to come home and depend upon me, and take all that I have. Other sisters have help from their brothers, and I——. But I will show thee, Dami, that thou must now remain where I place thee.
Full of such thoughts, Amrie at last reached the coal-burner’s. She saw no one except Mathew, who sat by his hut and smoked a wooden pipe, which he held with both hands. A coal-burner is like his kiln,—he is always smoking.
“Has anybody made a fool of me?” Barefoot asked herself. “Oh, that were a shame! What have I done to anybody, that they should put so miserable a joke upon me?”
With clinched hands and a burning face, she now stood before Mathew. He scarcely raised his eyes, much less did he utter a word. So long as the sun shone he was perfectly dumb; at night only, when no one could look him in the face, he began to speak.
Barefoot stared a moment in the face of the coal-burner, and then asked,—