"Oh, never mind Jeverssand," grumbled the old woman. "But I want to see where, long ago, my lad went to God!"
"If you want to see that," replied Hauke, "you must go and sit up under the ash-tree; from there you can look well out over the sea."
"Yes," said the old woman; "yes, if I had your young legs, dikegrave!"
For a long time such were the thanks for the aid that the dikegrave and his wife had given her; then all at once there was a change. One morning Wienke's little head peeped in at her through the half-open door. "Well!" called the old woman, who was sitting on her wooden chair with her hands clasped, "what message have you got to tell me?"
But the child came silently nearer and looked at her unceasingly with indifferent eyes.
"Are you the dikegrave's child?" asked Trien' Jans, and, as the child lowered her head as if nodding, she continued: "Sit down here on my footstool then! It was an Angora tom-cat—as big as that! But your father killed him. If he were still alive you could ride on him."
Wienke looked at the white skin dumbly; then she knelt down and began to stroke it with her little hands as children do a living cat or dog. "Poor Tomcat!" she said, and continued her caresses.
"There," exclaimed the old woman after a while, "now it's enough; and you can still sit on him today; perhaps your father only killed him for that!" Then she lifted the child up by both arms and set her down roughly on the stool. But as Wienke sat there silent and immovable, only looking at her all the time, she began to shake her head: "Thou art punishing him, Lord God! Yes, yes, Thou art punishing him!" she murmured; but pity for the child seemed to come over her after all: she put out her bony hand and stroked the little girl's sparse hair and an expression came into the child's eyes as if she liked the touch.
A QUIET CORNER