tarted,
and the uncle said quickly:

"Stay where you are, Damie, and you too. What do you want up there?
Don't you hear the mice running about?"

"Come with me--they won't eat us!" Amrei insisted. Damie, however,
declared that he would not go, and Amrei, although she felt a secret
fear, took courage and went upstairs alone. But she soon came down
again, looking as pale as death, with nothing in her hand but a bundle
of old straws.

"Damie says he'll go with me to America," said the uncle, as she came
forward. Amrei, breaking up the straws in her hands, replied: "I've
nothing to say against it. I don't know yet what I shall do, but he can
go if he likes."

"No," cried Damie, "I shan't do that. You did not go with Dame Landfried
when she wanted to take you away, and so I shall not go off alone
without you."

"Well, then, think it over--you are sensible enough," said the uncle, to
conclude the matter. He then closed the shutters again, so that they
stood in the dark, and hurried the children out of the room and through
the vestibule, locked the outside door, and went to take the key back to
Coaly Mathew. After that he started for the village with Damie alone.
When he was some way off, he called back to Amrei:

"You have until tomorrow morning--then I shall go away whether you go
with me or not."

Amrei was left alone. She looked after the retreating figures and
wondered how one person could go away from another.

"There he goes," she thought, "and yet he belongs to you, and you to
him."

Strange! As in a sleep-dream, a subject that has been lightly touched
upon is renewed and interwoven with all sorts of strange details, so was
it now with Amrei in her waking-dream. Damie had made but a passing
allusion to the meeting with Farmer Landfried's wife. The remembrance of
her had half faded away; but now it suddenly rose up fresh again--like a
picture of past life in a vision. Amrei said to herself, almost aloud:

"Who knows if she may not thus suddenly think of you? One cannot tell
why she should, and yet perhaps she is thinking of you at this very
moment. For in this place she promised to be your protectress whenever
you came to her,--it was yonder by the stunted willows. Why is it, that
only the trees remain to be seen? Why is not a word like a tree,
something which stands firmly, something which one can hold to. Yes, one
can, if one will. Then one is as well off as a tree--and what an
honorable farmer's wife sa