Her eyes fell on the crucifix over the dead woman's bed. "And Thou! Thou let'st everything go as it will, and Thou helps no one that cannot help himself," she murmured bitterly in her storm of grief to the silent enduring image above, whose significance she never could understand. She was terrible in her righteous anger. All that lay in her of her father's inflexible nature had developed itself unfettered up yonder in the wilds, and her great and noble heart that knew none but the purest impulses drove without suspecting it ill-seething blood through her veins. She gathered together her sacred relics, the cards, on which the dying woman's clammy fingers had traced the last message of her love; then she went out into the kitchen to Annemiedel. "I will now go on, cousin," she said calmly, "I only beg thee to tell me how things fell out between Luckard and Stromminger--" she no longer called him father. The old woman had just served the soup in a wooden bowl and she insisted on Wally's sharing it with her. "Thou must know," she said, while Wally was eating, "Vincenz there, he knows just how to come over thy father, and he's got the better of him altogether. Ever since the summer, Stromminger's had a bad foot and cannot walk. So Vincenz goes up to him every evening and passes the time for him playing cards, and always lets him win--he thinks he'll gain once for all when he wins thee. The old man can hardly live now without Vincenz, and so little by little he's given him the oversight of everything, because with his lame foot he can never get about himself. So Vincenz thinks now the house and farm half belong to him already, and bustles in and out just as he pleases. That was how the quarrel began with Luckard, for Luckard, she would always see that everything was right and fair, as she was used to do, and Vincenz took everything out of her hands and she durst never say a word. Then when he saw that Luckard was downright pining, he said to her that he'd let her manage everything just as if she'd been mistress, and that he'd take care to wink at anything she might like to do, if she'd only help him to get thee--for he knew very well that she could do anything with thee. And then Luckard grew angry; 'She'd never stolen in her life,' she said, 'and wasn't going to begin now in her old age--she wanted nothing but what she could earn honestly, and that as for the man who'd look on at cheating and say nothing, she'd never recommend him to Wally,' she said. And what does the villain do? goes straight to Stromminger and accuses Luckard. He'd convinced himself now, he said, that it was only Luckard that had set thee against him and thy father, and it was all her doing, he said, that thou was so unruly, because she was fain to hold everything under her own hand. That's how it all came about. And it just broke her heart to think that such things were believed of her, when not a word of it all was true. It grieved her such injustice should be done.