Violet shook her head and sighed. Fritz's description of the lamplighter's daughter did not fit in with her thoughts at all. The little sick maiden reading the book given her by her mother did not resemble in any point Fritz's fat girl selling fruit on the chapel steps.
Again she sighed heavily, and murmured to herself, half in a whisper, "Oh, I wonder!"
"What do you wonder about? What do you want to know? I'll tell you if you don't bother," said Fritz quickly.
"I want to know if Minna could ever have had a 'little mother.'"
Fritz had by this time succeeded in smashing the blade of the sword short off close to the very handle, and was standing up now, looking very red and angry opposite her, with a fearful smudge of paint on his lip and another on his cheek.
"Violet!" he cried passionately, "see what thou hast made me do! Thou art a little goose thyself." He waved the broken stump of the sword in his hand, and then he stopped.
Violet's book had slipped off her knees on to the floor, and Fritz, with his natural rough politeness, had stooped to pick it up. As he did so, he saw the written inscription on the fly-leaf. For a full minute he gazed at it; then looking up covertly at her, he saw that she had tears in her eyes.
"Violet," he cried remorsefully, with his two stout arms stretched out to embrace and comfort her, "don't cry; it could not be the same girl, for," he added with decision, "Minna never had any mother; of that I am quite sure."