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Some deftly carved boxes and figures of chamois and their hunters stood on Carlen's best-room mantel, much admired by her neighbors, and longed for by her toddling girl, these, and a bunch of dried and crumbling blossoms of the Ladies' Tress, were all that had survived the storm. The dried flowers were in the largest of the boxes.
But it was also true that never since the first day of his mysterious coming had Wilhelm been long absent from Carlen's thoughts; and she did indeed find him as her father's keen eyes, sharpened by greed, had observed good to look upon. That most insidious of love's allies, pity, had stormed the fortress of Carlen's heart, and carried it by a single charge.
As he walked toward the house, revolving these disquieting conjectures, all his first suspicion and antagonism toward Wilhelm revived in full force, and he was in a mood well calculated to distort the simplest acts, when he suddenly saw sitting in the square stoop at the door the two persons who filled his thoughts, Wilhelm and Carlen, Wilhelm steadily at work as usual at his carving, his eyes closely fixed on it, his figure, as was its wont, rigidly still; and Carlen, ah! it was an unlucky moment John had taken to search out the state of Carlen's feeling toward Wilhelm, Carlen sitting in a posture of dreamy reverie, one hand lying idle in her lap holding her knitting, the ball rolling away unnoticed on the ground; her other arm thrown carelessly over the railing of the stoop, her eyes fixed on Wilhelm's bowed head.
Among my visitors yesterday was Miss Percy, the heiress of Guy's Cliff, one of the richest in England, and, what is odd, the translator of "Emilie Carlen's Birthright," the only Swedish novel I have ever got fairly through, because Miss Percy really does her work well, and I can't read 's English.
But there came one day a letter to John that awoke even in Carlen's motherly and contented heart strange echoes from that past which she had thought forever left behind. It was a letter from Hans Dietman, who still lived on the Pennsylvania farm, and who had been recently joined there by a younger brother from Germany.
There was something in Carlen's confident belief which communicated itself to John's mind, and, coupled with the fact that there was certainly only circumstantial evidence against Wilhelm, slowly brought him to sharing her belief and tender sorrow. But they were alone in this belief and alone in their sorrow. The verdict of the community was unhesitatingly, unqualifiedly, against Wilhelm.
American fraus, American mans, are sheep in dere house." But in regard to this young stranger, Frau Weitbreck seemed strangely stirred from her usual phlegmatic silence. Carlen's appeal to her had barely been spoken, when, rising in her place at the head of the table, the old woman said solemnly, in German, "Yes, Liebchen, he goes with the eyes like eyes of a man that saw always the dead.
At that second a step was heard, and looking up they saw Wilhelm himself coming toward them, walking at his usual slow pace, his head sunk on his breast, his eyes on the ground. Great waves of blushes ran in tumultuous flood up Carlen's neck, cheeks, forehead. John took his hands from her shoulders, and stepped back with a look of disgust and a smothered ejaculation.
As they stood close together, John holding the candle high over Carlen's head, she bending over the tangled yarn, the kitchen door opened suddenly, and their father came in, bringing with him a stranger, a young man seemingly about twenty-five years of age, tall, well made, handsome, but with a face so melancholy that both John and Carlen felt a shiver as they looked upon it.
In the next instant he held Carlen's unconscious form in his arms; and when Farmer Weitbreck, half dazed, reached the foot of the stairs, the first sight which met his eyes was his daughter, held in her brother's arms, apparently lifeless, her head hanging over his shoulder. "Haf she seen him?" he whispered. "No!" said John.
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