"Was I to leave him to starve?" she asked; and then, growing suddenly red, she added, correcting herself shyly, "I mean the gnäd'ger Herr."
He nodded to reassure her, for she looked as if she expected to be chastised on the spot for her slip of speech, poor miserable creature!
"I don't go down there oftener than I can help. Generally I go over the Cats' Bridge by night to Bockeldorf, three miles away. There, at Bockeldorf, I could get flour and meat, and everything else that he--the gnädiger Herr--wanted, if I paid double the price for it, and be back by the morning. But sometimes it's impossible to get there--in a snow-storm, for instance, or a flood. So when the weather was very bad I was obliged to go down to the village, and had to pay still more money there, and even then perhaps get nothing but blows. So"--she laughed a wild, almost cunning laugh--"I just took what came handy."
"That means--you thieved?"
She gaily nodded assent, as if the achievement was deserving of special praise.
She was so depraved, then, this strange, savage girl, that she was quite incapable of distinguishing the difference between right and wrong!
"And what were you doing in the village yesterday?" he questioned anew.
"Yesterday? Well, you see, he must be buried. It's time, Herr, quite time. And I thought to myself, however much I cry, that won't get him under the earth."
"So you cried, did you?" he asked contemptuously.
"Yes," she replied. "Was it wrong?"