In the meantime Trien' Jans too wandered out in the same direction; she carried a burden in her arms wrapped in an old blue-checked pillow slip, holding it carefully as if it had been a child; and her gray hair blew about in the gentle spring breeze. "What are you carrying there, Trina?" asked a peasant who met her. "More than your house and home," she replied and went on eagerly. When she came near to old Haien's house, which stood down below, she turned down the "Akt" as we call the cattle-paths and footways that run up or down the side of the dike. Old Tede Haien was just standing out in front of the door looking at the weather. "Well, Trien'!" he said as she stood before him, panting and digging the point of her stick into the ground. "What have you got new in your bag?" "First let me come in, Tede Haien! Then I'll show you," she said with an odd gleam in her eyes. "Come in then," said the old man. Why should he bother about the foolish woman's eyes? And when they were both inside she went on: "Take the old tobacco box and writing things away from the table--what do you want to be always writing for? There! And now wipe it off nice and clean!" And the old man, who was beginning to be curious, did everything that she told him. Then she took the blue pillow slip by the corners and shook the body of the great cat out on the table. "There you have him," she cried, "your Hauke has killed him." Whereupon she began to cry bitterly. She stroked the thick fur of the dead animal, laid its paws together, bowed her long nose over its head and whispered indistinct words of endearment into its ear. Tede Haien watched the scene. "So," he said, "Hauke killed him?" He did not know what to do with the blubbering woman. She nodded grimly: "Yes, by God, he did it!" and she wiped away the tears from her eyes with her gnarled gouty hand. "No child, nothing alive any more!" she sobbed. "And you know yourself how it is with us old ones, after All Saints' Day's over our legs freeze at night in bed and instead of sleeping we listen to the northwester rattling at the shutters. I don't like to hear it, Tede Haien, it comes from where my lad went down in the mud." Tede Haien nodded and the old woman stroked her dead cat's coat. "And this one here," she began again, "in the winter when I sat at my work and the spinning wheel and hummed he sat beside me and hummed too and looked at me with his green eyes! And when I was cold and crept into bed--it was not long before he sprang up too and laid himself on my shivering legs and then we slept warm together!" And the old woman looked at the old man standing beside her at the table with smouldering eyes as if she wanted his assent to this memory.