stirred.

"That is how the old woman saved her life. And she may be fairly called
courageous; for it is a fact that there are not many girls here who
could have breathed like cherubs while they heard that talk going on
about the pigs. Well, the two brigands set to work to lift up the dead
man; they wrap him round in the sheets and chuck him out into the little
yard; and the old woman hears the pigs scampering up to eat him, and
grunting, _hon! hon_!

"So when morning comes," the narrator resumed after a pause, "the woman
gets up and goes down, paying a couple of sous for her bed. She takes up
her wallet, goes on just as if nothing had happened, asks for the news
of the countryside, and gets away in peace. She wants to run. Running
is quite out of the question, her legs fail her for fright; and lucky it
was for her that she could not run, for this reason. She had barely gone
half a quarter of a league before she sees one of the brigands coming
after her, just out of craftiness to make quite sure that she had seen
nothing. She guesses this, and sits herself down on a boulder.

"'What is the matter, good woman?' asks the short one, for it was the
shorter one and the wickeder of the two who was dogging her.

"'Oh! master,' says she, 'my wallet is so heavy, and I am so tired, that
I badly want some good man to give me his arm' (sly thing, only listen
to her!) 'if I am to get back to my poor home.'

"Thereupon the brigand offers to go along with her, and she accepts his
offer. The fellow takes hold of her arm to see if she is afraid. Not
she! She does not tremble a bit, and walks quietly along. So there they
are, chatting away as nicely as possible, all about farming, and the
way to grow hemp, till they come to the outskirts of the town, where the
hunchback lived, and the brigand made off for fear of meeting some of
the sheriff's people. The woman reached her house at mid-day, and waited
there till her husband came home; she thought and thought over all that
had happened on her journey and during the night. The hemp-grower came
home in the evening. He was hungry; something must be got ready for
him to eat. So while she greases her frying-pan, and gets ready to fry
something for him, she tells him how she sold her hemp, and gabbles away
as females do, but not a word does she say about the pigs, nor about
the gentleman who was murdered and robbed and eaten. She holds her
frying-pan in the flames so as to clean it, draws it