“Yes, I have,” she said, and she turned terribly pale. “You wanted to know how it was with Hilde Karstens and with the cabinet-maker. He was the man with whom my mother was living at that time. Hilde was fifteen and I was thirteen. She and I was good friends, together all the time, even on the dunes one night when the spring-tide came. The men were wild after her. Lord, she was pretty and sweet. But she laughed at ’em. She said: ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to marry a man--a real man that can do things; till then, just don’t bother me.’ I didn’t go to the dance at the ‘Jug of Hösing’; I had to stay home and help mother pickle fish. That’s when it all happened. I could never find out how Hilde Karstens got to the mounds on the heath alone. Maybe she went willingly with the pilot’s mate. It was a pilot’s mate; that’s all we ever knew about him. He was at the ‘Jug’ for the first time that night, and, of course, he wasn’t never seen again. It was by the mounds that he must have attacked her and done her the mischief, ’cause otherwise she wouldn’t have walked out into the sea. I knew Hilde Karstens; she was desperate. That evening the waves washed her body ashore. I was there. I threw myself down and grasped her wet, dead hair. They separated me from her, but I threw myself down again. It took three men to get me back home. Mother locked me up and told me to sift lentils, but I jumped out of the window and ran to Hilde’s house. They said she’d been buried. I ran to the church yard and looked for her grave. The grave-digger showed it to me far off in a corner. They looked for me all night and found me by the grave and dragged me home. Half the village turned out to see. Because I’d run away from the lentils my mother beat me with a spade handle so that my skin peeled from my flesh. And while I lay there and couldn’t stir, she went to the schoolmaster, and they wrote a letter to the squire asking if he wouldn’t take me to work on the estate. The house was empty, and the cabinet-maker came into the kitchen where I was lying. He was drunk as a lord. He saw me stretched out there by the hearth, and stared and stared. Then he picked me up and carried me into the bedroom.” She stopped and looked about as though she were in a strange place and as though Christian were a menacing stranger.