"What else then? See that you don't meddle! The name is short. And what is, is!"
The smith stamped away toward the living room. In the clear moonlight which now lay on the landing, Katharine could plainly see from above his black woolly head. It passed through her mind that if one should strike it with a sledge-hammer, the head would be the harder of the two.
Nevertheless something of the picture that he had seen that evening remained in Fausch's mind. The impression lingered for days and weeks, and often occupied his thoughts. Once or twice he asked Katharine about the boy: "What is the little fellow doing? Do you still feed him so well?"
Chapter IV
The time passed in Waltheim as it does everywhere. At the smithy Katharine sighed at every year's end, as people are apt to do: "Lord, it has only just begun, and now it is gone already."
Once, when the old year was making way for the new, she added: "One can see by the boy how old one is growing."
The year just ending was the sixth since the boy at the smithy was born.
"The boy," Katharine would say, because she would not speak his name aloud, and yet dared not give him any other.
"Cain!" called the smith from the road, if he wanted the boy in the workshop, or through the house, if he were looking for him anywhere. His voice had a sullen ring like that of his biggest anvil, and was so loud that the name could be heard for a couple of hundred paces round about. But when anyone asked the child himself his name, he would raise his delicate face innocently to the questioner and say: "My name is Cain, Cain."
And he had already become accustomed to say the name twice, for on hearing it the first time, people either did not understand him or would not believe him.