"When do you mean?" asks Stasy. "At lunch, or in the evening, or early this morning?"
"Yesterday evening, in the drawing-room," Stella replies, somewhat impatiently.
"That talk with Rohritz was a little reprehensible," Katrine says, with a laugh.
"In your place, after having been guilty of such a breach of decorum, I could not make up my mind to look him in the face," Stasy declares.
She slips into the water before the others, and is now trying, holding by the pole between the rocks, to tread the waves. The water hisses and foams, as if resenting her trampling it down.
"Was it really so bad, Aunt Katrine?" Stella asks, changing colour.
Katrine leans towards her, gives her a kindly pat on the shoulder, lifts her chin caressingly, and says,--
"Well, your remarks were certainly not extraordinarily pertinent, but I hardly think that Rohritz took them ill. 'Tis hard to take things ill of such a pretty, stupid, golden butterfly as you."
With which Katrine cautiously sets her slender foot among the yellow irises and white water-lilies on the edge of the water.
"It was terrible, then,--it must have been terrible if even you thought it so!" says Stella, as the tears rush to her eyes, and drop into the stream at her feet.