This is shorter, because my grandmother was not over big. I don’t know if it will be long enough for you. It’s so short. We’re of a height. Let’s try whether we can sleep in it full length. It’s no sleep at all to sleep all doubled up. Mine is long and broad. There’s room enough for two in it.”

Nimbly she swung her big, light limbs on to the bed and lay full length in it, the tips of her toes touching a moulding at the foot of the bed. Andreas was bending over her. She lay as joyous and innocent under him as she had lain under the goat. Andreas looked at her half-open mouth, she stretched out her arms, and drew him gently to her, so that his lips touched hers. He straightened himself—it flashed through him that this was the first kiss of his life. She let him go, then gently drew him to her again, and gave him another kiss, and then, in the same way, a third and fourth. The door swung in the wind—Andreas felt that somebody had looked in. He went to the door and out into the passage—it was empty. Romana followed close behind, he went downstairs without a word, and she followed him, quite buoyant and free.

Downstairs, her father was standing telling the foreman how to bring in the part of the aftergrowth which had dried first. She ran confidingly to him and leaned against him. Standing beside the great child, the handsome man might have been her betrothed.

Andreas went towards the stable as if he had important business there. The servant came hastily out of the gloom, nearly ran into him, cried “Hallo there!” as though he had not recognized his master, and at once talk spurted from his moist mouth. The maid—that was a fine girl for you, she was busy helping him to cure the horse. She didn’t come from here either: she came from the valley, and could do what she liked with the farmer folk. But the master needed no telling; he knew pretty well what he was about: he had got a young and pretty one. Well, well, that was the way in Carinthia—that was life! For by the time they were fifteen every maid had had her man, and the farmer’s daughter was just as willing to leave her door unbolted as the dairymaid, one today, another tomorrow, so that everybody got his chance. There was a fire in Andreas’s breast which leapt to his throat, but not a word left his mouth. He longed to strike the fellow across the mouth—why did he not do so? The other felt it, and recoiled half a pace. But Andreas’s mind was elsewhere. His eyeballs quivered. He saw Romana sitting in the dark on her virgin bed, in her nightgown, her feet drawn up under her, watching the door. She had shown him her door and the empty room beside it, and it all rolled past his eyes like mountain mist. He did not want to pursue the thought—strove to turn away from it.