her, but when she looked at him, she felt as if she would have liked to
run away.

Damie now came with the key. Amrei started to take it from him, but he
would not give it up. With the peculiar pedantic conscientiousness of a
child he declared that he had faithfully promised Coaly Mathew's wife to
give it to nobody but his uncle. Accordingly the uncle took it from him,
and it seemed to Amrei as if a magic secret door were being opened when
the key for the first time rattled in the lock and turned--the hasp went
down and the door opened! A strange chill, like that of a vault, came
creeping from the black front-room, which had also served as a kitchen.
A little heap of ashes still lay on the hearth, and on the door the
initials of Caspar Melchior Balthasar and the date of the parent's
death, were written in chalk. Amrei read it aloud--her own father had
written it.

"Look," cried Damie, "the eight is shaped just as you make it, and as
the master won't have it--you know--from right to left."

Amrei motioned to him to keep quiet. She thought it terrible and sinful
that Damie should talk so lightly--here, where she felt as if she were
in church, or even in eternity--quite out of the world, and yet in the
very midst of it. She herself opened the inside door; the room was dark
as a grave, for the shutters were closed. A single sunbeam, shining
through a crack in the wall, fell on the angel's head on the tile stove
in such a way that the angel seemed to be laughing. Amrei crouched down
in terror. When she looked up again, her uncle had opened one of the
shutters, and the warm, outside air poured in. How cold it seemed in
there! None of the furniture was left in the room but a bench nailed to
the wall. There her mother used to spin, and there she had put Amrei's