The child looked at the speaker with wide-open eyes, as if to say:  “Doesn’t my mother know anything about it?”

But the woman continued: 

“That’s the worst of it, that you poor children cannot know what virtuous parents you had, and therefore older people must tell you.  Remember that you will give real, true happiness to your parents, when they hear, yonder in heaven, how the people down here on earth are saying ’The Josenhans children are models of all goodness—­one can see in them the blessing of honest parents.’”

The tears poured down the woman’s cheeks as she spoke these last words.  The feeling of grief in her soul, arising from quite another cause, burst out irresistibly at these words and thoughts; there was sorrow for herself mingled with pity for others.  She laid her hand upon the head of the girl, who, when she saw the woman weeping, also began to weep bitterly; she very likely felt that this was a good soul inclining toward her, and a dawning consciousness began to steal over her that she had really lost her parents.

Suddenly the woman’s face seemed irradiated.  She raised her still tearful eyes to heaven, and said: 

“Gracious God, Thou givest me the thought.”  Then, turning to the child, she went on:  “Listen—­I will take you with me.  My Lisbeth was just your age when she was taken from me.  Tell me, will you go with me to Allgau and live with me?”

“Yes,” replied Amrei, decidedly.

Then she felt herself nudged and seized from behind.  “You must not!” cried Damie, throwing his arms around her—­and he was trembling all over.

“Be still,” said Amrei, to soothe him.  “The kind woman will take you too.  Damie is to go with us, is he not?”

“No, child, that cannot be—­I have boys enough.”

“Then I’ll not go either,” said Amrei, and she took Damie by the hand.

There is a kind of shudder, wherein a fever and a chill seem to be quarreling—­the joy of doing something and the fear of doing it.  One of these peculiar shudders passed through the strange woman, and she looked down upon the child with a certain sense of relief.  In a moment of sympathy, urged on by a pure impulse to do a kind deed, she had proposed to undertake a task and to assume a responsibility, the significance and weight of which she had not sufficiently considered; and, furthermore, she had not taken into account what her husband would think of her taking such a step without her having spoken to him about it.  Consequently when the child herself refused, a reaction set in, and it all became clear to her; so that she at once acquiesced, with a certain sense of relief, in the refusal of her offer.  She had obeyed an impulse of her heart by wishing to do this thing, and now that obstacles stood in the way, she felt rather glad that it was to be left undone, and without her having been obliged to retract her promise.