4 FOLLE-FARINE. ¦i choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes opeusd, as they had opened on him, with a sudden lustre and fierceness, hke those in a netted animal's taoatrent but untamed regard. ' ffitor.71 seized a„nd searched her eagerly, stripping Iher of the w».''m rox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her liiae rough henipen shirt, which were all dripping with the water from the melted snow. The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom • on it; it had been tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as silk in texture, and transparent, showing the course of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished, but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the feet were the long, arched, slender feet of the southern side of the Pyrenees. She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a coarse piece of homespun linen; she was still half frozen, and in a state of stupor, either from amaze- ment or from fear. She was quite passive, and she never spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, and who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of it, after the manner of her kind. About the child's head there hung a little band of glit- tering coins; they were not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they were, and seized them with gloat- ing hands and ravenous eyes. The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, and fought to guard them—fiercely, with tooth and nail, as the young fox whose skin she had worn might have fought for its dear life. The old woman, on her side, strove as resolutely; long curls of the child's hair were clutched out in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she fought—fought with all the breath and the blood tha* were in her tiny body. She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for the sinewy grip of the old peasant; and the coins were torn off her forehead and hidden away in a hole in the wood, out of 1 er sight, where tbe old peasant hoarded all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles that she managed to secrete from her master's all-seeing eyes. They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic characters, chained together after the Eastern fashion. To Pitchou they looked a diadem of gold worthy of an empress. The child watched them re- moved in perfect silence ; from the moment they had been wrenched away, and the battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as though dis- dainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered in her eyes, and smoldered there like a half-stifled fire—it burned on and on for many a long year after- wards unquenched. When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll of bread, she would neither eat nor drink, but turned her face to the wall—mute. " Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman muttered. She had seen them burn in the gloom of the evening through the orchard trees, as the stars rose, and asReine Flamma listened to tire voice that wooed her to her destruction. She let the child be, and searched her soaked gar- ments for any written word or any token that might be on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's skin there was a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it her master. Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its superscription to the light of the lamp. He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the char- acters his tough frame trembled, and his withered skin frew red with a sickly, feverish quickening of the lood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he had been proud of those slender letters that had been so far more legible than any that the women of her class could pen, and on beholding which the good bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concern- ing her being almost fitted to be bis own clerk and scribe. For a moment, watching those written ciphers that had no tongue for him, and yet seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all the fair honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faint- ness, a srrdden swooning sense seized him for the first time in all Iris life ; his limbs failed him, he rank down on his seat again, he gasped f or breath ; he noeded not to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the creature, whom be had believed so pure that God had deemed tbe earth unworthy of her youth, was----- His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, his ears were filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the roaring of his own mill-waters in a time of storm. All at once he started to his feet, and glared at the empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands wildly together irr the air, aird cried aloud: "She was a saint, I said—a saint! A saint in body and soul! And I thought that God begrudged her, and held her too pure for man!" And he laughed aloud—thrice. Tlie child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly desiring warmth, as a little frozen beast that coils itself in snow to slumber into death, startled by that horrible mirth, came forward. The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked limbs glimmered like gold in the dusky light; her hair was as a cloud behind her; her little scarlet mouth was half open, like the mouth of a child seeking its mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and burned and shone like stars. They had seen tbe same face ere then in Calvados. She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn by that awful and discordant laughter, and by that leaping ruddy flame upon the earth, and she stretched out her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not what. He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground. She fell without a sound. The blood flowed from her mouth. He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once more. " She was a saint !—a saint 1 And the devil begot in her thai!" Then he went out across the threshold and into the eht, with the letter still clinched in his hand. The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was cov- ered with ice and water; he took no heed, but passed through it. his head bare and his eyes blind. The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the child. CHAPTER m. All night long he was absent. The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull brutish nature could be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised the little wounded I oataK-: eroaiure, and carried her to her own palet bed; restored her to eonactongnaw hy such rude means as ' nigh Th she had knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She did all this harshly, as it was her custom to do all things, and without tenderness or even pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to ner, and she also had guessed the message of that unread letter. The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and was weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough nurse no peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish, tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually on the unknown name of Phratos. The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She who had always known the true story of that disap- pearance which sonre had called death and some had deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves, that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight dark brows. " She is his sure enough," she muttered. He was the first with Eeine Flamma. 1 wonder has he been the last." And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at any evil thought. The mastiff stayed beside the child. She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat down again to her spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again. She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the past which her master and her townf oik had never held, it all seemed natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint. The hours passed on ; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in the loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman slum- bered undisturbed, ut-.ess some falling ember of the wood aroused her. She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led that deadening life of perpetual labor and of perpetual want in which the human ani- mal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine; put to what use she might be—to spi ' flax, to card wool, to wring a pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a prayer, or drown a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a preference, it might be for the office that hurt some living thing; but she did not care : all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough-to eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe around her throat at night. The night went on, and passed away : one gleam of dawn shone through a round hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun arisen, and the fire dead upon the hearth. She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house-door. She drew it slowly open, and saw'by the light of the sun that it had been for some time morning. The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all the branches ; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid mill-stream ; in one of tbe leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the bough a cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even its famished impatience. Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw ner master there. Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil, which he spared to himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting wood ; going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would have found it a severe task to move; he was laboring breathlessly, giving himself no pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod ancle deep in snow, .Tnd although his clothes were heavy with icicles. He diO not see or hear her; she went up to him and called hir.n by his name ; he started, and raised his head and looker} at her. Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon his face ; it had been lean, fur- rowed, weather-beaten always, but it was livid now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage look that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man recalled from some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the living world. The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke orrt in her old blunt, dogged fashion : " Is she to stay?" Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know if the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup-kettle, her kneaded dough, her spun hemp, her household labor. He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make, held fast, yet striving to essay a death, grip; then he checked himself, and gave a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and went on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to venture to ask more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this, fasting and in silence, there had been long and fierce warfare in his soul, and some great evil done for which he sought to make atone- ment. So she left him, and passed into the house, and built up afresh her fire, and swept her chamber* out, and fastened up her round black pot to boil, and muttered all tbe while: "Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend." And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food. Now. what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no utterance could be ever got. But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at Yprès from that time thenceforward. Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he