"Indeed! was that simply clumsiness?"
"What else should it be?"
"I thought you had done it on purpose," she says, with apparent utter indifference. He gives no answer, and she quietly nods a few times to herself as much as to say, "It seems I was right after all!"
The days pass by. Relations between Johannes and Trude are cooler than they were. They do not avoid each other, they even talk together, but their former happy-go-lucky mode of intercourse is irretrievably lost.
"She is offended because I kissed her," thinks Johannes, but it does not strike him that he too has changed his behavior towards her.
"Children, what's up with you?" says Martin one evening grumblingly. "Have your throats grown rusty, as you never sing now?"
For a few seconds both are silent, then Trude says, half turning towards Johannes, "Will you?" He nods; but as she has not been looking at him she thinks she has had no answer and says, turning towards Martin, "You see, he doesn't want to!"
"Don't I though!" laughs Johannes.
"Then why can't you say so at once?" she answers with a timid attempt at responding to his cheerful tone.
Then she puts herself in position, folds her hands in her lap as she is wont to do when singing, and fixes her eyes on the pigeon-house yonder.