t talking about that fire. He has been setting
fires, the scalawag! Forward now, march!"

William had been setting fires? The old woman lifted her hands in
amazement. It could be believed that her William had set fires!

"Jesus, Mary!" she made the sign of the cross and folded her hands. "A
sin!" Why, that was a crime! Her William a criminal? That was almost
enough to make you laugh! "Ha, ha!" She laughed convulsively: "No,
constable, William never does anything of that kind."

"Come along," said the constable, shoving William out of the door.
"We shall find out about that. If the fellow has not done it, they will
send him back home again before very long!"

Indeed they would! Of this she was quite certain.

* * * * * *

But William did not come as soon as Widow Driesch had expected. Four
times she had already been at the chairman's house to find out about
it, and on the street and in the fields she shouted after him, "Hey,
Nicholas, when is William coming home?"

But he too could tell her nothing. He only shrugged, and consoled her,
when he saw her anxious face and expectant eyes, with the unvarying
words, "Do not be so hasty, Katie, he will soon come back!"

Meanwhile four weeks had come and gone. From the grove of fir-trees
near the village went forth an extraordinary odor of pitch;
slow-running, amber colored streaks had oozed from the shaggy trunks;
every drop of moisture seemed to have evaporated from the trees. In the
stillness of the August afternoon one could hear the falling of needles
and the crackling of twigs and branches. The sun had glowed too
ardently overhead.

A mealy odor came from the fields; the grain had been cut. It lay in
swathes on the ground; the women gathered, the men bound it into
sheaves, and the children, who now were at liberty to pass by the
closed door of the schoolhouse, ran about over the stubble and
collected the stray ears. The hammering of scythes after the day's work
was done, this monotonous village music, had ceased; in its stead could
now be heard by day the creaking of ox carts over the hardened clayey
road, while cries of "gee," "haw" and the cracking of whips woke the
echoes in the glimmering air above the fields.

All the people were in the fields--all but Katherine Driesch; she had
no harvest to gather. Quietly she sat in her cottage and heard, when
the rumble of the outgoing wagons had died away, nothing but the
buzzing of flies a