She wishes never to think of “it,” and yet she has to think of “it” constantly.  How has she become so wicked?  And then she searches and wonders how “it” came.

Ah Downie!  How tender are our souls, and how easily awakened are our hearts!

She was sure that “it” had not come at breakfast, surely not at breakfast.

Then she had only been frightened and shy.  She had been so terrified when she came down to breakfast and found no Maurits, only Uncle Theodore and the old lady.

It had been a clever idea of Maurits to go hunting; although it was impossible to discover what he was hunting in midsummer, as the old lady remarked.  But he knew of course that it was wise to keep away from his uncle for a few hours until the latter became calm again.  He could not know that she was so shy, nor that she had almost fainted when she had found him gone and herself left alone with uncle and the old lady.  Maurits had never been shy.  He did not know what torture it is.

That breakfast, that breakfast!  Uncle had as a beginning asked the old lady if she had heard the story of Sigrid the beautiful.  He did not ask Downie, neither would she have been able to answer.  The old lady knew the story well, but he told it just the same.  Then Anne-Marie remembered that Maurits had laughed at his uncle because in all his house he only had two books, and those were Afzelius’ “Fairy Tales” and Noesselt’s “Popular Stories for Ladies.”  “But those he knows,” Maurits had said.

Anne-Marie had found the story pretty.  She liked it when Bengt Lagman had pearls sewn on the breadth of homespun.  She saw Maurits before her; how royally proud he would have looked when ordering the pearls!  That was just the sort of thing Maurits would have done well.

But when uncle had come to that part of the story where Bengt Lagman went into the woods to avoid the meeting with his angry brother, and instead let his young wife meet the storm, then it became so plain that uncle understood Maurits had gone hunting to escape his wrath and that he knew how she thought to win him over.  —­Yes, yesterday, then they had been able to make plans, Maurits and she, how she should coquet with uncle, but to-day she had no thought of carrying them out.  Oh, she had never behaved so foolishly!  Every drop of blood streamed into her face, and her knife and fork fell with a terrible clatter out of her hands down on her plate.

But Uncle Theodore had shown no mercy and had gone on with the story until he came to that princely speech:  “Had my brother not done it, I would have done it myself.”  He said it with such a strange emphasis that she was forced to look up and to meet his laughing brown eyes.

And when he saw the trouble staring from her eyes, he began to laugh like a boy.  “What do you think,” he cried, “Bengt Lagman thought when he came home and heard that ‘Had my brother?’ I think he stopped at home the next time.”