"Perhaps my father'll come back," suggested Fritz, with a joyful leap.
Annchen shook her brown head. The boys were too little to understand, but she knew well that the father would never come back. She recollected the day when he marched away with the other soldiers to fight the French. He had lifted her in his arms. She had played with his beard and kissed him, and Fritz had cried after the glittering helmet-spike, till at last the father took the helmet off and gave it him to play with. Then the drum-tap sounded, and he had to go. The mother had watched awhile from the window, and when she could no longer see anything, had sat down to sob and cry with her apron over her face. Annchen recollected it perfectly, and that other dreadful day when Corporal Spes of the same regiment had come, with his arm tied up and a bandage round his head, to tell how the father had been shot in one of the battles before Paris, and buried in French soil. Everything had been sad since. There was less black bread at dinner-time, less soup in the pot, sometimes no soup at all, and the mother worked all day and far into the night, and cried bitterly when she thought the children were not looking. Annchen was too young to comprehend the full cause of these tears, but she felt the sadness; it was like a constant cloud over her childish sun. Now the stork was come to their roof, which all the neighbors said meant something good. Perhaps the happy days would begin again.
"How I hope they will!" she whispered to herself.
"Hope who will?" asked the mother, passing behind with an armful of wood.
Annchen felt abashed.
"The storks," she murmured. "Frau Perl said when they build on a roof it brings good fortune always." The mother sighed.
"There is no good fortune for us any more," she said sadly. "Even the dear stork cannot undo what is done."
"But aren't the storks lucky birds?" asked Fritz. "Jan Stein said they were."
"Ah, luck, luck!" answered the mother. "That is a word only. People use it, but what does it mean?"
"Isn't there any luck, then?" asked Annchen.