"Then may I ask why, if I am not to help you in the matter, we are talking about him at all?"
"I wanted to ask you whether—whether you think he will come often."
"I should think," said Axel positively, "that he will come very often indeed."
"Oh!" said Anna.
They walked on in silence.
"Have you considered," he said presently, "what you would do if your other—sisters want their relations asked down to stay with them? Christmas, for instance, is a time of general rejoicing, when the coldest hearts grow warm. Relations who have quarrelled all the year, seek each other out at Christmas and talk tearfully of ties of blood. And birthdays—will your twelve sisters be content to spend their twelve birthdays remote from all members of their family? Birthdays here are important days. There will be one a month now for you to celebrate at Kleinwalde."
"I have not got farther than considering Karlchen," said Anna with some impatience.
"A male Kuhräuber," said Axel musingly, swinging his stick and gazing up at the fleecy clouds floating over the pine tops, "a male Kuhräuber would be quite unlike anything you have yet seen."
"There are no male Kuhräubers," said Anna. "At least," she added, correcting herself, "Fräulein Kuhräuber said so. She said she had no relations at all, but perhaps—perhaps she has forgotten some, and will remember them by and by. Oh, I wish they would tell me exactly how they stand, and not try to hide anything! I thought we had left nothing unexplained in the letters, but now Karlchen—it seems——" She stopped and bit her lip. She was actually on the verge of criticising, to Axel, the behaviour of her sisters. "Look," she said, catching sight of red roofs through the thinning trees, "isn't that Lohm? I have seen you home without knowing it."
She held out her hand. "It isn't much good talking, is it?" she said, moved by a sudden impulse, and looking up at him with a slightly wistful smile. "How we talk and talk and never get any nearer anything or each other. Such an amount of explaining oneself, and all no use. I don't mean you and me especially—it is always so, with everyone and everywhere. It is very weird. Good-bye."