There was some rumor of a legal investigation to be held against the wretched woman, on the ground of David's dark insinuations. But even though the statements of the old servant were too incomplete and confused to build up a lawsuit upon them, they still sufficed to brand Trude Rockhammer as a criminal in the eyes of the world. The more she shrinks from all intercourse, the more anxiously she closes the mill to all strangers, the more extravagant grow the rumors that were spread about her. "The miller-witch," people come to call her, and the legends that surrounded her were handed down from one generation to the next. The mill now becomes the "Silent Mill," as the popular voice christened it. The walls crumble away; the wheels grow rotten; the bright, clear stream becomes choked with weeds, and when the State planned a canal which conducted the water into the main stream above Marienfeld--then it degenerated into a marsh. And Trude herself became entirely isolated, for soon she would not even allow her one friend to approach her, and closed her doors to him. Before her own conscience she was a murderess. Her terrors drove her to a father confessor and into the arms of the Catholic Church. She was to be seen crawling at the foot of a crucifix or kneeling at church doors, telling her beads and beating her head against the stones till it bled. She is expiating the great crime which is known as "youth."