"She wandered in the snowstorm with a new-born babe," said the judge, sternly; "and you gave her nothing?"
"We thought she was a bad woman," answered the people.
The judge shrugged his shoulders.
"And then you came to a bridge, and leant against it to look into the water. What happened after?"
Willi shuddered.
"I looked down, and wanted to jump in, but I was so frozen I could not lift my feet, and then—then, some one touched me, and when I turned round I saw a terrible woman, with a face of stone, with wild hair, and then—then I heard the ice crack below me, and then I knew nothing more."
The Holt farmer groaned aloud; the listeners looked at one another; the counsel began to speak with great eloquence, and bandied the word "Hallucination."
Willi listened amazed.
"So that is the name of that terrible woman," she thought.
Once she gazed at her father. He looked so broken that her eyes grew moist and damp, and a tear rolled slowly down her emaciated face and fell upon her hand. She did not perceive that silent, pale Death retreated from her, as little as she had felt his proximity. She only looked with weary eyes towards the door that closed behind the jury. What to her were Life and Death? But another tear rolled forth as she looked at her father, who also gazed at the closed door, as if there would issue thence a thunderbolt that could kill him. At last, at last, the men came out and spoke solemnly and earnestly—