Ernestine listened to all this with a beating heart, and now slipped out gently that the maid might not know she had overheard her. Outside she stopped to stroke the dog, but the poor thirsty brute growled at her. She saw that he had no water, and took his can to the well and filled it. When she saw the water gushing so sparkling from the pipe, she could not resist the temptation to let it run upon her burning head. "Ernestine, what mischief are you about now?" the housekeeper screamed from the window; but the water was already dripping down from the child's long hair upon her shoulders, breast, and back. "The sun will dry it before I get to the Frau Staatsräthin's, she thought, and carried the dog his drink; but when she attempted to pat him, he growled again, because he did not wish to be disturbed while drinking. "Even the dog does not like me," she thought, and crept away. "Only a girl! And my father is so cross to me because I am not a boy." And as she went on she repeated the phrase to herself, and her step kept time to it as to a tune, "Only a girl--only a girl!" From the window of the upper story her uncle and his wife looked after her. The wife presented an utter contrast to her husband. She was uncommonly stout, and her jolly face was so flushed that if her husband had really been a vampire she might have afforded him nourishment for a long term of ghostly existence. But he was no such monster, although his meagre body seemed to bask in his wife's warm fulness of life as some puny, starving wretch does in the heat of a huge stove. Any more poetical comparison is impossible in connection with Frau Leuthold; for, in spite of her massive beauty, her thick bushy eyebrows, her sparkling black eyes, her thick waves of dark hair, the whole expression of her large face, with its double chin and pouting mouth, was coarsely sensual. Yet there was something in this expression that showed that, however great the dissimilarity between the husband and wife in mind and body, there was still one thing in which they were alike: it was the heart,--in his case ossified, in hers overgrown with fat.