Then, resting her head, with its fair, fine hair, upon his arm, she sobbed bitterly; and Johannes, now completely broken down and mollified, wept with her.
Then they heard a door open in the hall. Probably, in their agitation, they had been talking too loudly.
Marjon took flight. In a moment of less excitement she would have been too shrewd for that. Johannes did indeed quickly put out the light, but he saw, through the crack of the door, that some one with a candle was standing in the hall. There was a meeting, and Johannes overheard a brief exchange of angry words, in vehement, suppressed tones.
The last he understood was: "To-morrow morning you leave."
XIV
About the time all this was taking place, something else occurred which most of you will readily recall. It happened at the time the King and Queen were married.
That was a time of many processions, when arches of honor were erected in all the squares, and when there arose, everywhere, the peculiar odor of spruce-boughs and of burning illuminants.
And the life of the King and Queen was far different from that of Little Johannes. They had to be decked often with beautiful clothes, and then as often to be undressed, to parade, to sit in state, to listen to wearisome harangues, to live through long dinners, and to be forever bowing and smiling. Such was their life.
To Johannes all this excitement and these joyful festivities seemed but a motley background against which his own sombre trouble was all the more sharply in relief. Although everybody was concerned about the King and Queen, and no one at all about Little Johannes, he yet found himself and his own sorrow none the less important.