e sausages hung, and began
to stroke one of them gently with her hand. "Why, it's this way," she
said, "a countess must be like an almond that I have soaked well in hot
water and slip out of its skin, beautiful and white."

Billy had once more bent over her chicken-wing. "Oh, that is it," she
said as she ate, "but Bonnechose says, _cette pauvre_ Runtze has had
her own romance and her own unhappy love-affair."

The corners of the housekeeper's mouth were drawn down still lower and
more tartly. "In our station all sorts of things can happen: we love
for a while and then again we don't and are at peace. But with our
mistresses it is different. If there is a hole in the cover of the old
sofa down in my room, I don't care, and some time when I have time I
mend it; but the company rooms upstairs must be spick and span, and
that's what I look out for every morning."

"I believe he was a miller?" asked Billy in a businesslike tone.

"Yes, a miller."

"Fair-haired?"

"No, red-haired."

Billy, her hunger now appeased, leaned back in her chair. "Oh,
red-haired, that's very pretty sometimes, and his face powdered with
flour and the red hair with it. But I am done now." She stood up. "I
thank you, Runtze, your meal was very good."

"That is the main thing," said the woman, "you are in love, and then
again you are not, but you always have to eat."

Billy went out, but she did not feel like going back up to her room,
which was so full of terrifying dreams. She walked down the corridor to
the outside door which led into the garden. It was the hour at which
she had been accustomed to go about of late anyway. Even to herself she
seemed ghostly and uncanny. But the garden was delicious, homelike. A
bit of a moon and very bright stars were in the sky. The mist had
advanced from the meadow into the garden. It was creeping over the
patches of turf and the beds. The flowers looked black, standing in the
white mists. A very intense joy warmed Billy's heart as she found that
this familiar reality had waited here for her and that she once more
belonged to all this. She walked along the gravel paths, she passed her
hand over the dew-laden tops of the roses and dahlias, she ate some of
the currants, she stood under the barberry bushes and breathed in the
moist, earthy smell that rose out of the old box there. But as she
walked thus, a more powerful agitation came over her. All these spots
spoke of Boris; she saw him and felt him again,