Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
"How long, long ago!" cried Carlen. "It seems only a day," said John. "I think time goes faster for a man than for a woman," sighed Carlen. "It is a shorter day in the fields than in the house." "Are you not content, my sister?" said John. Carlen was silent. "You have always seemed so," he said reproachfully. "It is always the same, John," she murmured. "Each day like every other day.
"What a glorious sight!" said one of them, with a deep-drawn breath; "I've never seen anything to touch it...." A couple of farmers' wives standing by peered curiously at the speaker and his companion. "Simme them folk must be lacken' their senses," said one to the other, "carlen' a sight like this bewtiful! Lacken' their senses, sure 'nough!"
They are all dead too, and then went away! Oh, brother, why cannot we win him out of this grief? We can be good friends to him; can you not find out for me what it is?" It was a cruel weapon to use, but on the instant John made up his mind to use it. It might spare Carlen grief, in the end. "I have thought," he said, "that it might be for a dead sweetheart he mourned thus.
"I think you are out of your senses. I do not know what has happened to you." And she turned to walk back to the house. John seized her shoulders in his brawny hands, and whirled her round till she faced him again. "Tell me the truth!" he said fiercely; "do you love this Wilhelm?" Carlen opened her lips to reply.
And John looked at him with a new interest and liking. If this were the true Wilhelm, he might welcome him indeed as a brother. Carlen alone looked grave, anxious, unhappy. She could not laugh. Tale after tale, jest after jest, fell from Wilhelm's lips. Such a story-teller never before sat at the Weitbreck board. The old kitchen never echoed with such laughter.
Why, men marry again, almost always, even when it is a wife that they have lost; and a sweetheart is not so much as a wife." "I have heard," said the pitiless John, "that a man is quicker healed of grief for a wife than for one he had thought to wed, but lost." "You are a man," said Carlen. "You can tell if that would be true."
Had the wild hilarity of his speech and demeanor in the evening been merely a new phase of disorder in an unsettled brain? Even in this was a strange, sad comfort to Carlen. She would rather have him mad, with alternations of insane joy and gloom, than know that he belonged to another.
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.
To John's sharpened perceptions the fact that Carlen was not as usual helping in this labor loomed up into significance. "Why does not Carlen help you, mütter?" he said hastily. "What is she doing there, idling with Wilhelm in the stoop?" Frau Weitbreck smiled. "It is not alvays to vork, ven one is young," she said. "I haf not forget!" And she nodded her head meaningly. John clenched his hands.
"It is nothing. Go back to bed. It is not for vimmins!" Then Carlen was sure it was some ill to Wilhelm, and with a loud cry she darted to the barn, and flew up the stairway leading to his room. John, hearing her steps, confronted her at the head of the stairs. "Good God, Carlen!" he cried, "go back! You must not come here. Where is father?"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking