With clenched fists and a flaming face she stood before Coaly Mathew, who hardly raised his eyes to her—­much less did he speak.  As long as the sun was shining he was almost always mute, and only at night, when nobody could look into his eyes, did he like to talk, and then he spoke freely.

Barefoot gazed for a minute at the charcoal-burner’s black face, and then asked impatiently: 

“Where is my Damie?”

The old man shook his head.  Then Barefoot asked again with a stamp of her foot: 

“Is my Damie with you?”

The old man unfolded his hands and spread them right and left, implying thereby that he was not there.

“Who was it that sent to me?” asked Barefoot, still more impatiently.  “Can’t you speak?”

The charcoal-burner pointed with his right thumb toward the side where a foot-path wound around the mountain.

“For Heaven’s sake, do say something!” cried Barefoot, fairly weeping with indignation; “only a single word!  Is my Damie here, or where is he?”

At last the old man said: 

“He’s there—­gone to meet you along the path.”  And then, as if he had said too much, he pressed his lips together and walked off around the kiln.

Barefoot now stood there, laughing scornfully and, at the same time, sadly over her brother’s simplicity.

“He sends to me and doesn’t stay in the place where I can find him; now if I go up that way, why should he expect me to come by the foot-path?  That has doubtless occurred to him now, and he’ll be going some other way—­so that I shall never find him, and we shall be wandering about each other as in a fog.”

Barefoot sat down quietly on the stump of a tree.  There was a fire within her as within the kiln, only the flames could not leap forth—­the fire could merely smolder within.  The birds were singing, the forest rustling—­but what is all that when there is no clear, responsive note in the heart?  Barefoot now remembered, as in a dream, how she had once cherished thoughts of love.  What right had she to let such thoughts rise within her?  Had she not misery enough in herself and in her brother?  And this thought of love seemed to her now like the remembrance, in winter, of a bright summer’s day.  One merely remembers how sunny and warm it was—­but that is all.  Now she had to learn what it meant to “wait,”—­to “wait” high up on a crag, where there is hardly a palm’s breadth of room.  And he who knows what it means, feels all his old misery—­and more.

She went into the charcoal-burner’s log cabin, and there lay a cloth sack, hardly half full, and on the sack was her father’s name.

“Oh, how you have been dragged about!” she said, almost aloud.  But she soon got over her excitement in her curiosity to see what Damie had brought back.  “He must at least still have the shirts that I made for him out of Black Marianne’s linen.  And perhaps there is also a present from our uncle in America in it.  But if he had anything good, would he have gone first to Coaly Mathew in the forest?  Would he not have shown himself in the village at once?”