ee it, and it lies there in the road. Barefoot hurries
down and recovers the treacherous token. And now the truth comes over
her like the dawning of a terrible day. This is the suitor for
Rose--this is he of whom she spoke last evening. And is this man to be
deceived?

In the barn, kneeling on the clover which she was going to feed the
cows, Barefoot fervently prayed to Heaven to preserve the stranger from
ever marrying Rose. That he should ever be her own, was a thought she
dared not entertain--and yet she could not bear to banish it.

As soon as she had finished milking, she hurried across to Black
Marianne; she wanted to ask her what she should do. But Black Marianne
was lying grievously ill; furthermore she had grown very deaf, and could
hardly understand connected words. Barefoot did not dare to shout the
secret that she had half confided to her and that the old woman had half
guessed, loudly enough for Marianne to understand it, for people in the
street might hear her. And so she came back, not knowing what to do.

Barefoot had to go out into the fields and stay there the whole day
planting turnips. At every step she hesitated and thought of going home
and telling the stranger everything; but the consciousness of her
subordinate position in the house, as well as a special consideration,
kept her to the duty that she had been called upon to perform.

"If he is foolish and inconsiderate enough," she soliloquized, "to rush
into this affair without a thought, then there's no helping him, and he
deserves no help. And--" she was fain to console herself at last--"and
besides, engaged is not married anyway."

But all day long she was restless and unhappy. In the evening when she
had returned from the fields and was milking the cows, and Rose was
sitting with a full pail beside a cow that had been milked, she heard
the stranger talking with Farmer Rodel in the nearby stable. They were
bargaining about a white horse. But how came the white horse in the
stable?--until then they had had none.

"Who is that singing yonder?" the stranger now asked.

"That's my sister," answered the farmer. And at the word Barefoot joined
in and sang the second voice, powerfully and defiantly, as if she wanted
to compel him to ask who _that_ was over yonder. But her singing had the
disadvantage that it prevented her from hearing whether or not he did
ask. And as Rose went across the yard with her pail, where the white
horse had just been