CHAPTER VIII.
QUATREMAINS-QUATREPATTES.
“Mademoiselle, what do you weave?”
She sat at the entrance to her sleeping-place—a hole under the radiated roots of an ancient oak-tree. We had happened upon the shelter in our league-long flight. It was one of those burrows—those logettes into which past generations of the hunted and proscribed had sunk like moles. Many of our forests are honeycombed with them. Over the opening to this, once concealed by a cunning mat of weeds and branches, the roots had contrived a more enduring cover. Within, to walls and floor, yet clung the remnants of brushwood with which long ago the den had been lined.
Carinne was deftly busy over a queer contrivance—a sort of fencing mask that she plaited from thin tendrils of a binding-weed.
“Monsieur on his high perch at night will suffer from the mosquitoes?”
“Has mademoiselle reason to think so?”
“As I think I can tell when a little ape carries a nut in his pouch.”
“Alas! but how cynical of romance are the tiny blood-suckers! They fly on a chromatic scale, mademoiselle. Often I try to comfort myself with the fancy that I am listening to the very distant humming of church bells; and then comes a tiny prick, and something seems to rise from my heart to my face, and to blossom thereon. No doubt it is the flowers of fancy budding. And is the weed-bonnet for me?”
“I shall not want it in my burrow.”
This gave me exquisite gratification, which survived the many inconveniences to which I was put by the bonnet falling off at night, and my having to descend to recover it. But it soon appeared that the least whim of this fascinating child was to be my law.