She stood still, her eyes fixed on the ground.  Even in his hot wrath, John noticed this unwonted downcast look, and taunted her with it.

“You have even caught his miserable hangdog trick of not looking anybody in the face,” he cried.  “Look up now! look me in the eye, and say what you mean by all this.”

Thus roughly bidden, Carlen raised her blue eyes and confronted her brother with a look hardly less angry than his own.

“It is you who have to say to me what all this means that you have been saying,” she cried.  “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.  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.  Wilhelm, hearing the sound, looked up, regarded them with a cold, unchanged eye, and turned in another direction.

The color deepened on Carlen’s face.  In a hard and bitter tone she said, pointing with a swift gesture to Wilhelm’s retreating form:  “You can see for yourself that there is nothing between us.  I do not know what craze has got into your head.”  And she walked away, this time unchecked by her brother.  He needed no further replies in words.  Tokens stronger than any speech had answered him.  Muttering angrily to himself, he went on down to the pasture after the cows.  It was a beautiful field, more like New England than Pennsylvania; a brook ran zigzagging through it, and here and there in the land were sharp lifts where rocks cropped out, making miniature cliffs overhanging some portions of the brook’s-course.  Gray lichens and green mosses grew on these rocks, and belts of wild flag and sedges surrounded their base.  The cows, in a warm day, used to stand knee-deep there, in shade of the rocks.

It was a favorite place of Wilhelm’s.  He sometimes lay on the top of one of these rocks the greater part of the night, looking down into the gliding water or up into the sky.  Carlen from her window had more than once seen him thus, and passionately longed to go down and comfort his lonely sorrow.

It was indeed true, as she had said to her brother, that there was “nothing between” her and Wilhelm.  Never a word had passed; never a look or tone to betray that he knew whether she were fair or not,—­whether she lived or not.  She came and went in his presence, as did all others, with no more apparent relation to the currents of his strange veiled existence than if they or he belonged