She looked at him and laughed. There was no one in Redchester, and Redchester was all she knew of life, in the least like Herr Dremmel. She stretched herself in the roomy difference, happy, free, at her ease. "But I cannot believe," burst out Herr Dremmel with a passionate vigour that astonished him more than anything in his whole life as he seized the hand that kept on tearing up grass, "I cannot believe that you will not marry me. I cannot believe that you will refuse a good and loving husband, that you will prefer to remain with your father and solidify into yet one more frostbitten virgin." "Into a what?" repeated Ingeborg, struck by this image of herself in the future. She began to laugh, then stopped. She stared at him, her grey eyes very wide open. She forgot Herr Dremmel, and that he was still clutching her hand and all the grass in it, while her mind flashed over the years that had gone and the years that were to come. They would be alike. They had not been able to frostbite her yet because she had been too young; but they would get her presently. Their daily repeated busy emptiness, their rush of barren duties, their meagre moments of what when she was younger used to be happiness but had lately only been relief, those rare moments when her father praised her, would settle down presently and freeze her dead. Her face grew solemn. "It's true," she said slowly. "I shall be a frostbitten virgin. I'm doomed. My father won't ever let me marry." "You infinitely childish one!" he cried, becoming angry. "When it is well known that all fathers wish to get rid of all daughters." "You don't understand. It's different. My father--why," she broke out, "I used to dose myself secretly with cod liver oil so as to keep up to his level. He's wonderful. When he praised me I usedn't to sleep. And if he scolded me it seemed to send me lame." Herr Dremmel sawed her hand up and down in his irritation. "What is this irrelevant talk?" he said. "I offer you marriage, and you respond with information about cod liver oil. I do not believe the father obstacle. I do not recognize my honest little friend of these last days. It is waste of time, not being open. Would you, then, if it were not for your father, marry me?" "But," Ingeborg flashed round at him, swept off her feet as she so often was by an impulse of utter truth, "it's _because_ of him that I _would_." And the instant she had said it she was shocked. She stared at Herr Dremmel wide-eyed with contrition. The disloyalty of it. The ugliness of telling a stranger--and a stranger with hair like fur--anything at all about those closely related persons she had been taught to describe to herself as her dear ones. "Oh," she cried, dragging her hand away, "let my hand go--let my hand _go_!"