-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?"

Barefoot had plenty of time to indulge in these reflections; for the
sack had been tied with a cord, which had been knotted in a most
complicated way, and it required all her patience and skill to
disentangle it. She emptied out everything t