Now they began to chat, and Karl said:
"Dear Hermine! Now I can really turn the proverb about and say: what I had in abundance in my youth I wish for in old age, but in vain. How often we used to kiss when I was ten and you were seven, and now that I am twenty I mayn't even kiss your finger-tips."
"Once for all, I never want to hear another word of those impudent lies!" cried the girl half angrily, half laughing. "You've made it all up and it's false, I certainly don't remember any such familiarity."
"Unfortunately!" cried Karl; "but I remember it so much the better. And I remember too that it was you who began it and were the temptress."
"Karl, how horrid of you!" interrupted Hermine, but he went on unrelentingly:
"You must remember how often, when we were tired helping the poor children fill their broken baskets with shavings--and how cross it always made your carpenters--I used to have to build a little hut out of ends of boards, hidden away in among the big piles of lumber, a little hut with a roof and a door and a bench in it. And then when we sat on the little bench, with the door shut, and I might at last sit idle a minute, who was it that used to throw her arms around my neck and kiss me more times than I could count?"
At these words he nearly pitched into the water, for as he had tried again to approach unnoticed as he talked, she suddenly gave his little boat such a violent push that it almost upset. Her clear laugh rang out as his left arm slipped into the water to the elbow and he swore.
"Just you wait," he said; "I'll pay you out for this some day!"
"There's time enough ahead," she replied, "you needn't be in too much of a hurry, my dear sir." Then she continued somewhat more seriously, "Father has found out about our intentions; I didn't deny them, in the main; he won't hear of such a thing, and forbids us ever to think of it again. So that is how we stand now."
"And do you intend to bow to your father's decree as dutifully and unresistingly as you seem to?"