"We did."
The mistress was amazed.
"Good Lord, they actually admit it! Ah, accursed ones, you ought to respect old men!"
She drove us away, and in the evening she complained to the shopman, who spoke to me angrily:
"How can you read books, even the Holy Scriptures, and still be so saucy, eh? Take care, my brother!"
The mistress was solitary and touchingly sad. Sometimes when she had been drinking sweet liqueurs, she would sit at the window and sing:
"No one is sorry for me,
And pity have I from none;
What my grief is no one knows;
To whom shall I tell my sorrow."
And sobbingly she drawled in the quavering voice of age:
"U—00—00—"
One day I saw her going down the stairs with a jug of warm milk in her hands, but suddenly her legs gave way under her. She sat down, and descended the stairs, sadly bumping from step to step, and never letting the jug out of her hand. The milk splashed over her dress, and she, with her hands outstretched, cried angrily to the jug: