e him dislike to hire
another helper. Nothing more was heard of Ludwig. From the day he left
Stephen's house, he had disappeared from his life.

Always grimy, bearing the signs of his work upon him, Stephen Fausch
went about, so that a stranger, seeing him for the first time, carried
away the impression of having seen a bit of darkness in the midst of
broad daylight. Yet summer was upon the land, and the smith, who seemed
so gloomy both in look and bearing, often sat, when his work was clone,
on the bench before his door and gazed, with a peculiar expression of
mingled surprise and admiration, at a beautiful sunset, a slowly
drifting cloud, or the increasing brilliancy of a star. He felt a
strange pleasure in looking at a well formed animal that passed along
the road, would watch a beautiful woman or would slowly follow a child,
the expression of whose face had struck him, would scrutinize it
earnestly, though without any special friendliness, and would then turn
thoughtfully away, keeping the same face in mind for some time
afterward and delighting in it.

One night at the close of one of these summer evenings Stephen saw his
wife's child again. It was just such a clear night as that on which
Maria had lain dead on her bed. Above the black band of woodland that
bounded the eastern sky with its irregular line, floated the moon, as a
white pond-lily gazes forth from the dark, still water. The smith had
been sitting in front of his house and was going thoughtfully upstairs
to his living room, when Katharine beckoned to him in the corridor. She
was quite excited, but evidently anxious as to what he might say.

"You must just see that--just once," said she and motioned toward the
ladder-like stairs that led to her attic room. He followed her almost
unconsciously, still lost in his own thoughts, and saw her withered
hand slide upward along the banister at every step, then saw it feel
over the bedroom door, and, pushing it back, cling to it as if nailed
there, and only then did it occur to him that he was standing on the
threshold of the maid's room, and that in the gray basket, under those
rather unsightly wrappings, lay the child.

Katharine now stepped into the room and went over to the basket bed.
She was trembling a little, perhaps embarrassed by her own daring. "He
looks exactly--like your wife--at the last," said she, smoothing the
child's coverings so carefully that he did not wake up, and handling
him just as ten