Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/137

 him? Certainly report did not speak to his credit—but then, in this instance, report only meant Provst Tönnesen, who could scarcely be called impartial on this subject. But what right had he to assume a hidden design behind his frankness?

He mentally recalled the whole conversation. But as, by so doing, he was again reminded by the weaver's strange words of his mother, his thoughts were all at once turned in another direction.

He had not often heard his mother mentioned since he had been grown up, and altogether he did not know much more about her than what he remembered to have seen himself. For several years he had felt that there was something in her early life which the family were anxious to hush up. What it was he had never been able to discover. After his mother's unhappy death—his young friends and companions had been afraid even of alluding to her in his presence; and he had had a natural shyness in speaking of her to strangers, especially as his father and his other relations always preserved absolute silence concerning everything connected with her. Only an aged aunt who lived in a convent had once, in a moment of excitement, said that he must never forget "how deeply his mother had offended the prejudices of her class." Now, the weaver's words and the pictures on the walls of the peasant's room pointed out distinctly what direction this