“See what’s the matter with that boy,” he heard a woman saying to a girl fourteen or fifteen years old. “Perhaps he has lost something.”
“Have you lost anything?”
Walter looked up, and was surprised; for he seemed to have seen that face before. It reminded him of Fancy.
“Now, everything will be all right There you are; and I have been hunting for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, yes, but I just didn’t know it. But I know it now. Tell me right quick how to write the poem!”
The girl, who was helping her mother place the linen on the grass for bleaching, looked at Walter in astonishment. She hurried back to her mother to say that she didn’t know what was the matter with the boy, but that there was certainly something wrong. “He looks as if he were scared half to death,” she decided.
Then she ran and fetched water from the house near by and made Walter drink. He saw that he had made a mistake; but there was something in the manner of the girl that drew him to her irresistibly, even though her name was only Femke. So the mother addressed her. And this name reminded him of Fancy, which was something.
Femke pointed to an inverted basket and told him to tell the cause of his trouble; and Walter did it as well as he could, while the mother was busy with the linen.
“Maybe I can help you,” the mother said. “I have a nephew who is a widower.”