Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/177

 It looked as if the gamekeeper's daughter had kept the other two back to impart some important piece of news to them.

The little girl in black was bending forward, almost doubled up, to look her friend in the face, as if by so doing she could draw out the words with her eyes. Hansine, on the other hand, appeared only to hear with one ear. She was looking down, or to one side, as if wishing to hide her inattention. When they passed a flower by the wayside, which she could reach without letting go her friend's arm, she stooped and picked it.

Emanuel observed these trifles while absently answering the questions of the two peasants concerning the Provst and the future.

His eyes hardly left Hansine. He could not explain to himself what it was that interested him so strongly in this young girl, whom, in a way, he hardly knew at all. An impenetrable taciturnity always came over her in his presence, and altogether he had only spoken two or three times to her, and then merely on indifferent subjects. On his visits to her home she had always sat silent, half turned away, on the end of the bench under the window, without ever looking up from her work; but there was something in her curiously introspective character—in her glance, shy and defiant at the same time—yes, even in the reserve with which she armed herself in his presence, which impressed him with an almost