cted me, and her making the fire all by herself and
taking her ease there in the solitude of the woods. Then she ate some
of the potatoes, quite simply, like a young animal that had been
deserted; and, you may believe me or not as you please, but tears ran
down my cheeks. The fields and all around were so big and wide and gray
and cool. Her fire, and she herself, seemed to me the only tiny living
point in all the gray mist. I knew, too, that she had no mother. Then I
saw her go, gravely and silently, along the path toward her home. I
shall never forget that picture."

The two girls looked at each other in amazement. When Horny recounted
to them the experience about which he had so long been reticent, they
were walking up and down in the evening on the Sperber farm.

"Why did he never tell us that before?" asked Roese, but she got no
answer. "The Sperbers want us to take more notice of her," she
continued; "and now it's really possible to do something with her.
She's not so shy as she used to be, and one can talk quite sensibly
with her. And she dislikes the same things we dislike. What pleases her
best is to run about in the fields and work. Oh, but she's got a nice
life of it!"

"I don't know," said Marie--"all alone like that!"

"Yes," said Horny again, "she has something about her that makes me
think of a queen. She does what she pleases and thinks what she
chooses. She lives her own life."

"As if queens did that!" said Roese.

"The kind of queens I mean," answered Horny, "may live in the
Wuenschgengasse or on the Ettersberg."

"Oh, that sort of queens!" laughed Marie.

"That's the only sort that's worth while! They must be young, and pure,
and free, and joyous, and look every one straight and proudly in the
eye."

Roese and Marie were delighted. "We're three queens!" they called to
Ernst von Schiller and Budang. "Come, we'll go and pay a visit to the
third."

So they all set off and went by a narrow path through a few fields and
meadows, by a sand-pit, to the Rauchfuss farm, and found its young
mistress sitting in the garden under the lime-tree, eating her supper.
On the white-covered table was a bowl of sour milk from which she
ladled some out every little while, and a loaf of fresh bread, and a
plate of golden butter shining against the white cloth.

"Oh, how nice," said Roese, "the way she has her supper!" And they were
asked to share it, and presently each of them was sitting in front of a
bowl o