"Walk, child? Your uncle knew well what he was doing when he stuck me up on this diabolic crag. I have not a pair of shoes that would last me half-way down. And merely to look at the road that leads to this place! Oh!"—she covered her eyes with her hand and shuddered—"it makes me reel with giddiness!"
"It was very lovely in the forest," said Sidonia. "The wild raspberries are nearly ripe, and——"
"Raspberries! Alas! is that what you ought to think of at your age? You, too—'tis monstrous cruelty!"
"The fawns are growing and are so sweet——"
"Fawns! Fawns? 'Tis a lover should be sweet to you. As for me—oh woe!"
Sidonia, slight, slim, and sun-kissed as a young woodland thing herself, grew crimson behind her aunt's dejected head.
"Why—why, then, does Uncle Ludovic keep us here?" she queried.
Uncle Ludovic's lady flounced round in her chair, her eyes darting flames, a flood of words rising to her cherry lips—
"Why? Because, my love, the creature is a Barbe-Bleue. And to be a Bluebeard, child, means that if a wretched woman has been fool enough to trust you, you think you have a right to chop her head off if she disobeys; and meanwhile to shut her up to prevent her having so much as a chance."
"I wonder why you married Uncle Ludo?" mused the girl. Her eyes were dreaming, across the fair plain-land, into the distance. To give your life to some one quite old and quite stout, with a grizzled double chin and veins that swell on a red forehead (ran the fleeting thought), when, about the ways of the forest, a young knight might be met wandering ... a knight with hair that crisped back from forehead of ivory, with eyes that were scornful and full of fire!