She made as if to go.
“You fatigue me, monsieur. It is not the part of a gentleman to impose his company where it is not desired. You will not remain by my consent.”
“Then I shall remain nevertheless!” I cried, a little angrily. “I must not allow mademoiselle to constitute herself the victim to a false sentiment.”
She left me without another word, going off to her pigs; and I flung myself down again in a pet by the brookside.
* * * * * * *
All that afternoon and evening I wandered about in the neighbourhood of the little hill. I was hot and angry—after a humorous fashion—with myself rather than with Carinne. If I had chosen to invest my self-imposed knight-errantry with a purely fictitious order of merit, I could hardly blame the girl for declining to recognise its title to respect. At the same time, while I assured myself I detested her, I could not refrain from constantly speculating as to the nature of her present reflections. Was she still haughtily indignant at my insistence, or inclined to secret heart-searchings in the matter of her rather cavalier rejection of my services? Like a child, I wished her, I think, to be a little sorry, a little unaccountably sad over the memory of the stranger who had come and gone like a sunbeam shot through the melancholy of her days. I wished her to have reason to regret her unceremonious treatment of me. I did not wish her to overlook my visit altogether—and this, it would appear, was just what she was doing.
For, when I once, somewhere about the fall of dusk, climbed softly to the top of the hillock to get view of her, perchance, from ambush, I was positively incensed to hear her voice coming up to me in a little placid song or chant that was in itself an earnest of her indifference and serenity. She sat against a tree at the foot of the slope, and all about her, uncouthly dumped on the fallen mast, were a score of drowsy pigs. She sang to them like Circe, while they twitched lazy ears or snapped their little springs of tails; and the sunset poured from the furnace-mouth of the valley and made her pale face glorious.
Now she did her beauty more justice by voice than by brush, though in each art she was supremely artless; but there was a note of nature in the first that was like the winter song of a robin. And presently she trilled a little childish chansonnette of the peasants that touched me because I had some memory of it:—
The little bonne, Marie,
(À moi, mon poupon!)