oorway, and, shading his
eyes from the noonday sun, gazed long and fixedly in the direction of
a narrow rift which a few score paces away breaks the monotony of the
upland level. This man was tall and thin and unkempt, his features
expressing a mixture of cunning and simplicity. He gazed a while in
silence, but at length uttered a grunt of satisfaction as the figure
of a woman rose gradually into sight. She came on slowly, in a
stooping posture, dragging behind her a great load of straw, which
completely hid the little sledge on which it rested, and which was
attached to her waist by a rope of twisted hay.

The figure of a woman--rather of a girl. As she drew nearer it could
be seen that her cheeks, though brown and sunburned, were as smooth as
a child's. She looked scarcely eighteen. Her head was bare, and her
short petticoats, of some coarse stuff, left visible bare feet thrust
into wooden shoes. She advanced with her head bent and her shoulders
strained forward, her face dull and patient. Once, and once only, when
the man's eyes left her for a moment, she shot at him a look of scared
apprehension; and later, when she came abreast of him, her breath
coming and going with her exertions, he might have seen, had he looked
closely, that her strong brown limbs were trembling under her.

But the man noticed nothing in his impatience, and only chid her for
her slowness. "Where have you been dawdling, lazy-bones?" he cried.

She murmured, without halting, that the sun was hot.

"Sun hot!" he retorted. "Jeanne is lazy, I think! _Mon Dieu_, that I
should have married a wife who is tired by noon! I had better have
left you to that never-do-well Pierre Bounat. But I have news for you,
my girl."

He lounged after her as he spoke, his low, cunning face--the face of
the worst kind of French peasant--flickering with cruel pleasure, as
he saw how she started at his words. She made no answer, however.
Instead, she drew her load with increased vehemence towards one of the
two doors which led into the building. "Well, well, I will tell you
presently," he called after her. "Be quick and come to dinner."

He entered himself by the other door. The house was divided into two
chambers by a breast-high partition of wood. The one room served for
kitchen; the other, now half full of straw, was barn and granary,
fowl-house and dove-cote, in one. "Be quick!" he called to her.
Standing in the house-room, he could see her head as she stooped t