gether while the
smith was working. The two voices resounded between the cling-clang of
the hammers, Fausch's dull or loud, then the child's voice clear and
high, like the sound of the hammer when it rebounded from the very
outer tip of the anvil. The figures of the man and the boy made a
striking contrast. When he was near the boy, Fausch looked still
heavier, stouter and darker than usual. The light of the forge fire
shone on his brown face and showed the charcoal streaks on it and the
dust in his thick, tangled, black beard. The sparks flew from his heavy
blows, but they flew in short spurts, as straight as an arrow to the
ground. They fell before the little boy's feet in their coarse shoes,
or even on his shoes, and if one glowed for some time on the rough
floor, the child would look at it and laugh with delight if it was slow
in dying out. But the boy was as fair as the man was dark. He stood
there looking as if he had just come out of a bandbox, for Katharine
still took the same care of him that she had formerly taken of the
little count. He did, indeed, wear coarse gray stockings, and his
jacket and trousers were made out of Fausch's cast off Sunday clothes.
The stuff was rough and homely, but the coarse shirt that showed at the
neck and wrists was of a glistening white, that looked so strangely
clean in the dirty blacksmith shop, that its color seemed, as it were,
to stab through the darkness. But that was not the only bright spot
about the child. His hands were small and slender and really quite
delicate, and they had a clever way of touching any dirty object with
the finger tips only, without getting soiled. But little Cain's head
was the fairest of all, poised on his slender white neck, that showed
above the soft, unstarched collar. The boy's face was of such a rare
and almost unearthly beauty, that Katharine, who was a pious soul and
none too clever, often and often stood near Cain, when he was not
noticing her, and gazed at him, with folded hands and open mouthed
astonishment. At such times a secret shudder would pass through her
spirit, and strange thoughts through her old head. Supposing that the
boy, Cain, was not really a human being, supposing that--an angel was
dwelling under the smith's roof, and--

When such thoughts came to Katharine, who, unlike Stephen Fausch, was a
Catholic, she would cross herself. Stephen Fausch was far from
regarding his boy as an angel, but when the child was not looking at