It was a glorious April day: the blue skies were cloudless, the glistening sunshine was bright on forest and fell, and the balmy air was fragrant with the odour of the first violets. The strip of forest which bordered, as it were, the dark mantle of pines was still light, light as if the dome of dark green had been removed from its shady aisles. The wealth of leaves that would shortly overpower each knotty bough and transform it to youth and beauty still lay compressed, a soft down, in millions of brown buds; the underbrush alone showed a pale, misty green, and from the damp moss the snow-drops hung upon long, slender stems. Kitty strayed aside, plucking these flowers, while Flora and Henriette walked on in the narrow path leading to the pines.
It was not quiet here to-day: it was the day upon which the poor of the town were allowed to gather fagots. There was the noise of the cracking of dry wood and of loud human voices, and in among the thickest bushes Kitty suddenly came upon a swarthy woman who was just tearing down a branch as thick as her arm that had been sawed from the parent stem. Irritated, perhaps, by being detected carrying off green instead of dead wood, perhaps by the sudden appearance of the commanding figure, the woman cast from beneath the purple kerchief she had tied over her head a savage glance at the intruder, and by the manner in which, standing erect, she trailed the bough to and fro upon the ground, seemed to challenge expostulation.
Kitty was not in the least afraid: she stooped to pluck a tuft of anemones from beneath a bush, when suddenly she heard a cry from the path,—a faint scream, followed by a tumult of voices in an under-tone.
The woman listened, tossed aside the bough, and dashed through the underbrush in the direction of the noise. Again the scream was heard: it was Henriette's thin, feeble voice. Kitty followed close upon the woman's heels; the thorns tore her dress, and the bushes which her forerunner parted with a strong arm flew back into her face, but she quickly emerged upon the path.
At first she saw only a knot of women and ragged lads gathered about the trunk of a pine-tree; but through the openings made here and there by the gesticulations of the throng Flora's white hat and blue feather could be seen behind the mass of bristly heads and dirty kerchiefs.
"Let the dwarf go, Fritz!" exclaimed a huge woman.
"But she screams like a fool!" said a boy's voice.
"What of that? not a soul can hear her little pipe." The woman had a broad snub-nose and small, wicked eyes, and towered like a giantess above all the rest.
Flora now spoke,—Kitty scarcely recognized her voice.
She was answered by a burst of contemptuous laughter.