HEIDI
“As if you had eaten something that would not go down.”
“No, not like that; something heavy as if I wanted to cry very much.”
“I see, and then do you have a good cry?”
“Oh, no, I mustn’t; Fräulein Rottenmeier forbade me to cry.”
“So you swallow it all down, I suppose? Are you happy here in Frankfurt?”
“Yes,” was the low answer; but it sounded more like “No.”
“And where did you live with your grandfather?”
“Up on the mountain.”
“That wasn’t very amusing; rather dull at times, eh?”
“No, no, it was beautiful, beautiful!” Heidi could go no further; the remembrance of the past, the excitement she had just gone through, the long suppressed weeping, were too much for the child’s strength; the tears began to fall fast, and she broke into violent weeping.
The doctor stood up and laid her head kindly down on the pillow. “There, there, go on crying, it will do you good, and then go to sleep; it will be all right to-morrow.”
Then he left the room and went downstairs to Herr Sesemann; when he was once more sitting in the armchair opposite his friend, “Sesemann,” he said, “let me first tell you that your little charge is a sleep-walker; she is the ghost who has nightly opened the front door and put your household into this fever of alarm. Secondly, the child is consumed with homesickness, to such an extent that she is nearly a skeleton already, and soon will be quite one; something must be done at once. For the first trouble, due to her over-excited nerves, there is but
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