“Why do squirrels store nuts in the summer?” she answered with a counterquestion, and gave a little metallic laugh. Suddenly she raised her eyes and looked at him for a bare second, her lashes quivering, a faint blush on her cheeks. He held his breath. The impulse he had felt the first time—the impulse to touch the tip of her nose and the curving red of her lips—came upon him overwhelmingly; her knees, outlined through her thin skirt, tempted him. His eyes soon fell upon the hook where the skirt was fastened at the waist. An impulse seized him to touch that, too. There seemed something endearing about that hook. He spent an awkward hour and called himself an idiot as he wended his way home that afternoon. She was kindly enough to have manifested a desire to have him stay longer, but he had suddenly risen and left. As soon as he was out of the hut he wished to go back, and wondered what had made him depart so abruptly, yet even as he wondered he pressed on resolutely toward home. “I thought your eyes were blue, but they are only green,” she had remarked. A few minutes before she had said something about the smallness of his eyes and the frailty of his body. He thought there was a touch of mockery in her voice as she said that. And the idea of asking him whether he liked songs! He did not pity her any longer. On the former occasion she had appeared humble, almost obsequious; today he scented pride. On his return home he determined to dismiss her from his mind. V. He might have dismissed Hedwiga from his mind had not a kindhearted gossip carried the report of his visit to his parents. Father and Mother held council. They had not been much concerned about their son’s religious belief, but the mother’s eye was ever vigilant as to his morals. “You had better talk to him,” David Zorn said. “He must stop these visits. You can never tell what they might lead to at his tender age.” Mrs. Zorn spent a troublesome night over this. She was alarmed but she did not wish to seem too antagonistic. She knew the effect of antagonism upon her impetuous, high-strung son. So she broached the subject with seeming levity, with playfulness almost. “But you know, Albert dear, a headman’s daughter is no company for Doctor Hollman’s grandson,” she urged persuasively. “The girl isn’t to blame because her father was a headman,” he returned. “Why should she bear the sins of her fathers?” The longer his mother argued the more reasons he found against her arguments. It was unjust to make the poor girl an outcast because her father had been an executioner, he insisted.