ne, while there is yet time,
Mademoiselle."

Jeanne's thin, stern lips trembled, almost as if in fear, as she
listened to Aimee. She turned her shaking head slowly towards her, then
fixed her deep eyes on hers, and said:

"I have warned your belle-fille, that she may be saved. It was my love
for her. Let her have nought to do with Them that dwell in the rocks and
the trunks of the great trees."

Old Aimee shook her stick on the floor with rage.

"Impious and wicked woman! Confess, I say, or I will tell the good cure,
who knows your tricks, and he will not give you absolution; and then
the Evil Ones will have their way with you yourself, for what shall
save you from them?"

The thin lips in the strange face trembled more. "The old sorceress
dwells alone, abandoned of all," she murmured. "If she take not a sou
when one or another will give it her, how shall she contrive to live?"

"What is it," demanded Aimee, with increasing shrillness, "that you have
told the child Marie about my grandson?"

A look of cunning suddenly drove away the expression of conscious guilt
in Jeanne's face. She dropped her eyes on the floor, mumbled
inarticulately a moment, and then said shiftily, "You have perhaps a few
sous in your pocket, Madame, to show good-will to the sorceress; for
without good-will she cannot tell you what you seek to know."

Aimee's keen eyes flashed, as drawing forth two sous from her pocket,
she said in a tone of incisive contempt, "You shall have these,
Mademoiselle, but not till you have told me the whole truth, as you
would to the cure at confession. Come then--say."

The sorceress began with shuffling tones and glances, which grew more
sure as she went on:

"I watched for the little one returning on the afternoon of Sunday--_he_
told me to do so. I was to give her the message that Antoine desired to
meet with her at the entrance of the Dwarf's Valley: I had but to give
the message: it was not my fault. I am but a poor old woman that does
the bidding of others."

"Well, well," said Aimee, impatiently, "what else did you tell her?"

Jeanne looked at her interlocutor again, and a strange expression grew
in her eyes.

"It is Jeanne that knows the Evil Ones, that knows their shape and their
speech. She knows them when they walk among men, and she knows them in
their homes in the dark valley."

"Chut, chut," cried Aimee, the more irritably that her maternal feelings
had to overcome her natural inclinatio