Amrei’s eyes filled with tears at these words; and yet she could say nothing, for she felt estranged toward this man.  His voice appealed to her, but when she looked at him, she felt as if she would have liked to run away.

Damie now came with the key.  Amrei started to take it from him, but he would not give it up.  With the peculiar pedantic conscientiousness of a child he declared that he had faithfully promised Coaly Mathew’s wife to give it to nobody but his uncle.  Accordingly the uncle took it from him, and it seemed to Amrei as if a magic secret door were being opened when the key for the first time rattled in the lock and turned—­the hasp went down and the door opened!  A strange chill, like that of a vault, came creeping from the black front-room, which had also served as a kitchen.  A little heap of ashes still lay on the hearth, and on the door the initials of Caspar Melchior Balthasar and the date of the parent’s death, were written in chalk.  Amrei read it aloud—­her own father had written it.

“Look,” cried Damie, “the eight is shaped just as you make it, and as the master won’t have it—­you know—­from right to left.”

Amrei motioned to him to keep quiet.  She thought it terrible and sinful that Damie should talk so lightly—­here, where she felt as if she were in church, or even in eternity—­quite out of the world, and yet in the very midst of it.  She herself opened the inside door; the room was dark as a grave, for the shutters were closed.  A single sunbeam, shining through a crack in the wall, fell on the angel’s head on the tile stove in such a way that the angel seemed to be laughing.  Amrei crouched down in terror.  When she looked up again, her uncle had opened one of the shutters, and the warm, outside air poured in.  How cold it seemed in there!  None of the furniture was left in the room but a bench nailed to the wall.  There her mother used to spin, and there she had put Amrei’s little hands together and taught her to knit.

“Come, children, let us go now,” said the uncle.  “It is not good to be here.  Come with me to the baker and I will buy you each a white roll—­or do you like biscuits better?”

“No, let us stay here a little longer,” said Amrei; and she kept on stroking the place where her mother had sat.  Then, pointing to a white spot on the wall, she said, half in a whisper:  “There our cuckoo clock used to hang, and there our father’s discharge from the army.  And there the hanks of yarn that mother spun used to hang—­she could spin even better than Black Marianne—­Black Marianne has said so herself.  She always got a skein more out of a pound than anybody else, and it was always so even—­not a knot in it.  And do you see that ring up there on the ceiling?  It was beautiful to see her twisting the threads there.  If I had been old enough to know then, I would not have let them sell mother’s spindle—­it would have been a fine legacy for me.  But there was nobody to take any interest in us.  Oh, mother dear!  Oh, father dear!  If you knew how we have been pushed about, it would grieve you, even in eternity.”