the spinning maids, night
after night alone on her bed, she wondered and trembled. Sometimes at
table her husband looked across at her and smiled; and then she felt
sure that Lanrivain was dead. She dared not try to get news of him, for
she was sure her husband would find out if she did: she had an idea that
he could find out anything. Even when a witchwoman who was a noted seer,
and could show you the whole world in her crystal, came to the castle
for a night's shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held back.

The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves de Cornault's
absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs.
Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat
and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by
the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them.
That evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found
the dog strangled on her pillow.

After that she said to herself that she would never have another dog;
but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found whining at
the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the maids to speak of
him to her husband. She hid him in a room that no one went to, smuggled
food to him from her own plate, made him a warm bed to lie on and petted
him like a child.

Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the greyhound
strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said nothing, and
resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger she would never
bring him into the castle; but one day she found a young sheepdog, a
brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying with a broken leg in the snow
of the park. Yves de Cornault was at Bennes, and she brought the dog
in, warmed and fed it, tied up its leg and hid it in the castle till
her husband's return. The day before, she gave it to a peasant woman
who lived a long way off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say
nothing; but that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door,
and when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped up
on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and the next
morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant woman when she
heard her husband ride into the court. She shut the dog in a chest, and
went down to receive him. An hour or two later, when she returned to her
room, the puppy lay strangled on her pillow..