"Oh, thank you, Andreas," she began, but he cut her thanks very short.
"Go home at once and dry yourself," he said. "You are the plague of my
life, and if I had been a wise man I should have left you in the marsh.
Could not your senses tell you that all that rain meant danger in boggy
places? There'll be mischief somewhere besides this; a landslip or two,
more than likely. There, run home, child, or you'll get cold."
He turned angrily away and went back to his work.
Anna hurried to the narrowest part of the brook and jumped across it.
She could not make herself in a worse plight than she was already; her
skirts were dripping with the black and filthy water of the marsh.
Heavy rain fell again during the night, and continued throughout the
morning, but in the afternoon there was a glimpse of sunshine overhead.
This soon drew the vapour up again from the valley, and white
steam-clouds sailed slowly across the landscape.
Gretchen had been very kind and compassionate about Anna's disaster; she
made the girl go to bed for an hour or two, and gave her some hot broth,
and Anna would have forgotten her trouble but for the certainty she felt
that old Andreas would make as bad a story of it as he could to her Aunt
Christina. But this morning the girl was looking forward to her father's
home-coming, and she was in good spirits; she had tried to make herself
extra neat, and to imitate as closely as she could her Aunt Christina's
way of tidying the rooms; but one improvement suggested itself to Anna
which would certainly not have occurred to her tidy aunt; if she had
thought of it, she would have scouted the idea as useless, and a
frivolous waste of time.
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