“It must be the frightful rain which has silenced the boy so!” remarked the aunt.
“Everything all comes together; let us go home, Aunt,” begged Paula, “there is no more pleasure here. First I lost my beautiful cross, and it can’t be found; then comes this endless rain, and now we can’t ever hear the merry goat-boy any more. Let us go away!”
“The cure must be finished, or it will do no good,” explained the aunt.
It was also dark and gray on the following day, and the rain poured down without ceasing. Moni spent the day exactly like the one before. He sat under the rock and his thoughts went restlessly round in a circle, for when he decided: “Now, I will go and confess the wrong, so that I shall dare to look up to the dear Lord again,” then he saw the little kid under the knife before him and it all began over again in his mind from the beginning; so that with thinking and brooding, and the weight he carried, he was very tired by night, and crept home in the streaming rain as if he didn’t notice it at all.
By the Bath House below the landlord was standing in the back doorway and called to Moni: “Come in with them. They are wet enough! Why, you are crawling down the mountain like a snail! I wonder what is the matter with you!”
The landlord had never been so unfriendly be-
