ir sight for ever so long."

It was but natural to ask her why she wanted to hide, and she uttered
vaguely what was rather a comment on my question:

"It was like fate." But I chose to take it otherwise, teasingly, because
we were often like a pair of children.

"Oh, really," I said, "you talk like a pagan. What could you know of
fate at that time? What was it like? Did it come down from Heaven?"

"Don't be stupid. It used to come along a cart-track that was there and
it looked like a boy. Wasn't he a little devil though. You understand,
I couldn't know that. He was a wealthy cousin of mine. Round there we
are all related, all cousins--as in Brittany. He wasn't much bigger than
myself but he was older, just a boy in blue breeches and with good shoes
on his feet, which of course interested and impressed me. He yelled to
me from below, I screamed to him from above, he came up and sat down near
me on a stone, never said a word, let me look at him for half an hour
before he condescended to ask me who I was. And the airs he gave
himself! He quite intimidated me sitting there perfectly dumb. I
remember trying to hide my bare feet under the edge of my skirt as I sat
below him on the ground.

"_C'est comique_, _eh_!" she interrupted herself to comment in a
melancholy tone. I looked at her sympathetically and she went on:

"He was the only son from a rich farmhouse two miles down the slope. In
winter they used to send him to school at Tolosa. He had an enormous
opinion of himself; he was going to keep a shop in a town by and by and
he was about the most dissatisfied creature I have ever seen. He had an
unhappy mouth and unhappy eyes and he was always wretched about
something: about the treatment he received, about being kept in the
country and chained to work. He was moaning and complaining and
threatening all the world, including his father and mother. He used to
curse God, yes, that boy, sitting there on a piece of rock like a
wretched little Prometheus with a sparrow pecking at his miserable little
liver. And the grand scenery of mountains all round, ha, ha, ha!"

She laughed in contralto: a penetrating sound with something generous in
it; not infectious, but in others provoking a smile.

"Of course I, poor little animal, I didn't know what to make of it, and I
was even a little frightened. But at first because of his miserable eyes
I was sorry for him, almost as much as if he had been a sick goat