She laughed. "Indeed you are wrong! I have as much capacity of terror as other girls," she replied, bravely. "Strange dogs, in particular, are my aversion, and I get out of their way whenever I can. But in critical situations there is no help for it; one must not give way to weakness; so I shut my teeth tight and take hold, and I suppose it looks very brave."
The doctor was following with his eyes a swallow flying away from the wood-shed, and he too now smiled, but without looking at Kitty. To her this smile seemed one of incredulity; he probably thought her boasting of her heroism, and unfemininely proud of her strength,—when nothing could be more foreign to her taste or to the truth.
"You doubt it?" she asked, with a glance that was only half merry. "Let me tell you that not until very lately did the heroine before you learn to rise superior to the dread of ghosts in the dark." An arch smile played about her lips and deepened the dimples in her cheeks. "You must know that the castle mill swarms with gnomes and fairies; its princely founder sometimes sees fit to descend from his worm-eaten frame to inspect the bags of grain himself; and there are not wanting the ghosts of dishonest millers who gave short measure during their lives. You may be sure that Susie never kept one such incontestable fact from my youthful ears; and I believed them all as firmly as if I had been brought up in a Thuringian spinning-room. Not a word of this 'fearful joy' could I utter to my father or my dear Lukas,—Susie would have been scolded, and I should have been ashamed; so I resigned myself to go when it was required of me from garret to cellar in black darkness, and to conquer my fears, although my teeth chattered as if from an ague-fit."
"Then you were early accustomed to make heavy drafts upon your power of self-control. How, then, did it happen that you were so ready to ascribe to a man an act of cowardice and weakness?"
She crimsoned. "You forgave me that yesterday," she said, evidently hurt, and yet not without self-assertion, as she stroked a stray lock of hair from her brow in hopes of thus concealing her blushes.
He shook his head. "You should not use that expression, after my assurance that you had done nothing to displease me," he rejoined, involuntarily lowering his voice, as if touching upon some matter known only to her and himself, the knowledge of which the rest of the world was not to share. "I only meant to say that I cannot imagine from what source your yesterday's conjecture sprang."
Kitty glanced towards the house; once more she looked rosy, lovely, and fresh as an apple-blossom; her head, with its crown of braids, seemed almost too young for her Juno-like figure. She pointed to the window of the corner room. "In old times a noble lady lived there——"
"Ah, the romantic story told, too, in many a peasant's spinning-room!" he interrupted her. "Then it was the tragical end of that forsaken dame——"
"Not that only. Henriette made me very anxious and unhappy——"
"Henriette is ill. The morbid state of her nerves makes thought and sensation unnatural in her case. But you are healthy in body and mind."