g, then!"

"Where to?"

"Can't you pile the wood that was unloaded yesterday?" he growled. Cain
immediately turned and went out.

Stephen Fausch stood for a moment looking toward the back door, by
which the boy had gone out; then he sat down on his anvil, with his
elbows on his knees, and stared at the ground, with bowed head. A band
of light that came through the great doorway fell upon him and threw
the man and the anvil into striking relief against the surrounding
darkness. He sat there so motionless and was so dark a shape, from his
clumsy shoes to his black, woolly head, that it was not easy to
distinguish where the iron of the anvil ended and the living man began,
or whether the whole was not an iron statue. Moreover, no one could
have seen that within him all was turmoil and struggle and strife.

But Stephen Fausch was thinking. All the way over the long road from
Waltheim the slander had followed them, which they had come so far to
avoid. And this gossip and scandal could follow Cain through the whole
world just as easily as it had come here. There was no avoiding it! And
it is your fault, Stephen Fausch, that the boy must be pursued by
scandal his whole life long. But ha ha, it is fair, perfectly fair! No
one asked you how you liked it, when Maria was--ha ha! So he must bear
it too, the child of sin, the sinner's name! He must bear it!

It was the old struggle between defiance and obstinacy, and that other
feeling of pity for the boy, that arose once more in Fausch. Only the
battle had never been so fierce before. The two forces wrestled
together and shook the powerful man back and forth like a reed, even
although outwardly he sat so still. Then too, other thoughts came to
him. He wanted to go away, the boy! All alone! They must part! Yes,
yes, of course, if he were alone, the boy might more easily pass
unnoticed through the world. Yes, of course! But to part!

Fausch shuddered. No longer to have the boy with him, no longer to see
him--in whom--Maria still seemed to live!--He could not sit still any
longer. He got up and walked back and forth. To give him up--the
boy!--The thought awoke once more his strange hunger for Cain. It drove
him to the door, to see him.

Over by the stable door the boy was piling up heavy logs of wood, which
lay in a confused heap on the ground. He was working diligently and
without looking about him.

Just then Vincenza came across the open space from the tavern. The
smith i