But however cheerfully and brightly Marianne might begin to speak, she always ended by relapsing into gloomy complaint and mourning; and she who professed to like to be alone and to think of nothing and to love nothing, only lived to think about her son and to love him.  Consequently Amrei made up her mind to release herself from this uncanny position of being alone with Black Marianne; she demanded that Damie should be taken into the house.  At first Marianne opposed it vehemently, but when Amrei threatened to leave the house herself, and then coaxed her in such a childlike way and tried so hard to do whatever would best please her, the old woman at last consented.

Damie, who had learned from Crappy Zachy to knit wool, now sat beneath the parental roof again; and at night, when the brother and sister were asleep in the garret, each one of them would wake the other when they heard Black Marianne down stairs, running to and fro and muttering to herself.  But Damie’s transmigration to Black Marianne’s was the cause of new trouble.  Damie was exceedingly discontented at having been compelled to learn a miserable trade that was fit only for a cripple.  He wanted to be a mason, and although Amrei was very much opposed to it, for she predicted that he would not keep at it, Black Marianne supported him in it.  She would have liked to make all the young lads masons, and then to have sent them out on their travels that they might bring back news of her John.

Black Marianne seldom went to church, but she always liked to have anybody else borrow her hymn-book and take it to church—­it seemed to give her a kind of pleasure to have it there.  She was especially pleased when any strange workman, who happened to be employed in the village, borrowed the hymn-book which John had left behind him for that purpose; for it seemed to her as if John himself were praying in his native church, when the words were spoken and sung out of his book.  And now Damie was obliged to go to church twice every Sunday with John’s hymn-book.

While Marianne did not go to church herself, she was always to be seen at every solemn ceremony in the village or in any of the surrounding villages.  There was never a funeral which Marianne did not attend as one of the mourners; and at the funeral sermon, and the blessing spoken over the grave, even of a little child, she always wept so violently that one would have thought she was the nearest relative.  On the way home, however, she was always especially cheerful, for this weeping seemed to be a kind of relief to her; all the year round she had to suppress so much secret sorrow, that she felt thankful for an opportunity to give vent to her feelings.

Could people be blamed if they shunned her as an uncanny person, especially as they were keeping a secret from her?  The habit of avoiding Black Marianne was partly extended to Amrei herself; in several houses where the girl called to offer help or sympathy she was made to see distinctly that her presence was not desired, especially as she herself was beginning to show certain eccentricities which astonished the whole village; for example, except on the coldest winter days she used to go barefoot, and people said that she must know some secret method to prevent herself from catching cold and dying.