etorted John.

"He is no tramp," she replied, still more doggedly.

"What do you know about him?" said John.

Carlen made no reply. Her silence irritated John more than any words
could have done; and losing self-control, losing sight of prudence, he
poured out on her a torrent of angry accusation and scornful reproach.

She stood still, her eyes fixed on the ground. Even in his hot wrath,
John noticed this unwonted downcast look, and taunted her with it.

"You have even caught his miserable hangdog trick of not looking anybody
in the face," he cried. "Look up now! look me in the eye, and say what
you mean by all this."

Thus roughly bidden, Carlen raised her blue eyes and confronted her
brother with a look hardly less angry than his own.

"It is you who have to say to me what all this means that you have been
saying," she cried. "I think you are out of your senses. I do not know
what has happened to you." And she turned to walk back to the house.

John seized her shoulders in his brawny hands, and whirled her round
till she faced him again.

"Tell me the truth!" he said fiercely; "do you love this Wilhelm?"

Carlen opened her lips to reply. At that second a step was heard, and
looking up they saw Wilhelm himself coming toward them, walking at his
usual slow pace, his head sunk on his breast, his eyes on the ground.
Great waves of blushes ran in tumultuous flood up Carlen's neck, cheeks,
forehead. John took his hands from her shoulders, and stepped back with
a look of disgust and a smothered ejaculation. Wilhelm, hearing the
sound, looked up, regarded them with a cold, unchanged eye, and turned
in another direction.

The color deepened on Carlen's face. In a hard and bitter tone she said,
pointing with a swift gesture to Wilhelm's retreating form: "You can see
for yourself that there is nothing between us. I do not know what craze
has got into your head." And she walked away, this time unchecked by her
brother. He needed no further replies in words. Tokens stronger than any
speech had answered him. Muttering angrily to himself, he went on down
to the pasture after the cows. It was a beautiful field, more like New
England than Pennsylvania; a brook ran zigzagging through it, and here
and there in the land were sharp lifts where rocks cropped out, making
miniature cliffs overhanging some portions of the brook's-course. Gray
lichens and green mosses grew on these rocks, and belts of wild flag and
sedges surround