“I know,” answered Molly, who had heard her. “I understand German, for we had a good woman that helped us for a long time when one of the children was little and Mother was not strong. She started me because she loved to talk her own language with some one, and I’ve kept it up. But you haven’t a bit of a German accent and talk English as well as we do. How does it happen?”
“That is what I have been wondering about for a long time. After this sickness I had to be taught German, but could talk English. My mother said that I had been bewitched,—that is what it would mean in English. She taught me to read the German newspapers that Jacob Klein has,—I haven’t called him Father since I found he wasn’t my father. Then I found an old German Bible that I supposed was my great-grandmother’s, from the date in it; but it was Jacob’s grandmother’s, of course. There is better German in that, and it has been a help,—to stand things, I mean.” Greta’s eyes filled with tears, but she dashed them away, saying, “I’m sorry to complain this way to you. Please do not tell any one.”
“I can’t promise that,” smiled Molly, “but if you feel the same way after I tell you a few things,—all right. But don’t you remember anything that happened before this time that you were sick?”
“I know that I have been at school somewhere, and that I have seen people like you somewhere and of course I am feeling pretty sure that there is something queer about all this. Why should I know these things if I had always been with these people? Yet it has been pretty well told me all about my mother’s people and how my aunt Gretchen always thought so much of me before she died and how my grandmother said I would make a good little worker and would help my mother.” Greta stopped with a whimsical smile. “I have, all right,” she added, “but I have had a chance to talk English every summer with the people that come to the cottages at the other end of the lake, and this summer a lady gave me a lovely book, all about girls like you.”
“Thank you for telling us about yourself, Greta. Now let me tell you what I heard this woman that you have been living with say.”
“‘This woman that you have been living with’?” thought Greta. “What does this girl mean?”
“She did not say much, and in the simplest German, but she said enough to make me listen to the rest,” continued Molly, going on to describe the scene, telling how the girls happened to stop at the place.
“Yes, that was Mother,” said Greta in reply to Molly’s question, after a detailed description of the woman whom she had seen.
“Well,” said Molly, “I saw a large stone by some bushes. There was a sort of tangle in that corner of the yard, near a pasture fence.” Greta nodded. She knew. “There was an old lilac bush and a syringa bush in my way, but I peeped around them to see who was crying and if anybody needed help. But here this woman was lying, almost on her face, her hands clutching the grass between some little bushes that were planted in a row, Greta. Then it was that I noticed the big stone in the corner and a row of small stones that started from it as if someone had been going to make a flower bed, you know. These all must be to mark the place, Greta.
“She was sort of moaning, in German, ‘my Greta, my Greta, my little Greta,’ and then she began to talk to her, just as I was going to slip away, not to intrude; and she wasn’t hurt, I could see. But she went on, ‘Your father never meant to kill you when he hit you that time, and I couldn’t see him hung, could I? So here you are without a stone with your name on it and not a prayer said over you when we hid you here!’ She burst out sobbing loudly then, but by that time I thought I ought to hear if she said anything more, and presently she was asking, ‘Wasn’t it better for no one to know, when the little girl came and could take your place, and her people were all dead in the storm?’”