“If I drink more, I shall have to be led and shall not be able to walk alone; and Marianne says ‘alone’ is the best conveyance, for then the horses are always harnessed.”

All were astonished at the child’s wisdom.

Young Farmer Rodel came in with his wife and asked the child, to tease her: 

“Have you brought us a wedding present?  For if one eats so, one ought to bring a wedding present.”

The father-in-law, moved by an incomprehensible impulse of generosity, secretly slipped a sixpenny piece into the child’s hand.  Amrei held the coin fast in her palm, nodded to the old man, and said to the young couple: 

“I have the promise and an earnest of payment; your deceased mother always promised me that I should serve her, and that no one else should be nurse to her first grand-child.”

“Yes, my wife always wished it,” said the old farmer approvingly.  And what he had refused to do for his wife while she was alive, for fear of having to provide for an orphan, he now did, now that he could no longer please her with it, in order to make it appear before the people that he was doing it out of respect for her memory.  But even now he did it not from kindness, but in the correct calculation that the orphan would be serviceable to him, the deposed farmer who was her guardian; and the burden of her maintenance, which would amount to more than her wages, would fall on others and not on him.

The young couple looked at each other, and the man said: 

“Bring your bundle to our house tomorrow—­you can live with us.”

“Very well,” said Amrei, “tomorrow I will bring my bundle.  But now I should like to take my bundle with me; give me a bottle of wine, and this meat I will wrap up and take to Marianne and my Damie.”

They let Amrei have her way; but old Farmer Rodel said to her secretly: 

“Give me back my sixpence—­I thought you were going to give it up.”

“I’ll keep that as an earnest from you,” answered Amrei slyly; “you shall see, I will give you value for it.”  Farmer Rodel laughed to himself half angrily, and Amrei went back to Black Marianne with money, wine, and meat.

The house was locked; and there was a great contrast between the loud music and noise and feasting at the wedding house, and the silence and solitude here.  Amrei knew where to wait for Marianne on her way home, for the old woman very often went to the stone-quarry and sat there behind a hedge for a long time, listening to the tapping of chisels and mallets.  It seemed to her like a melody, carrying her back to the times when her John used to work there too; and so she often sat there, listening and watching.

Sure enough, Amrei found Black Marianne there, and half an hour before quitting time she called Damie up out of the quarry.  And here among the rocks a wedding feast was held, more merry than the one amid the noise and music.  Damie was especially joyful, and Marianne, too, was unusually cheerful.  But she would not drink a drop of the wine, for she had declared that no wine should moisten her lips until she drank it at her John’s wedding.  When Amrei told with glee how she had got a place at young Farmer Rodel’s, and was going there tomorrow, Black Marianne started up in furious anger; picking up a stone and pressing it to her bosom, she said: