It was long after midnight when Garron paid his score under the tent. She had told him much in the meantime—there was no one to care whom she followed. She told him, too, she had come to the fête from a hamlet called Les Forêts, where she had been washing for a woman. The moon was up when they took the highroad together, following it until it reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, then Garron led the way abruptly to the right up a tangled lane that ran to an old woodroad that he used to gain the Great Marsh. They went lurching along together in comparative silence, the man steadying the girl through the dark places where the trees shut out the moon. Garron knew the road as well as his pocket—it was a favourite with him when he did not wish to be seen. Now and then the girl sang in a maudlin way:
"Entrez, entrez, messieurs,
C'est l'amour qui vous attend."
It was gray dawn when they reached the edge of the Great Marsh that lay smothered under a blanket of chill mist.
"It is over there, my nest," muttered Garron, with a jerk of his thumb indicating the direction in which his hut lay. Again he drew her roughly to him.
"Dis donc, toi!" he demanded brusquely: "how do they call you?" It had not, until then, occurred to him to ask her name.
"Eh ben—Julie," she replied. "It's a sacré little name I never liked. Eh, tu sais," she added slowly—"when I don't like a thing—" she drew back a little and gazed at him sullenly—"Eh ben—I am like that when I don't like a thing." Her flash of temper pleased him—he had had enough of the trustful kitten of Villette's.
"Come along," said he gruffly.
"Dis donc, toi," she returned without moving. "It is well understood then about my dress and the shoes?"
"Mais oui! Bon Dieu!" replied the peasant irritably. He was hungry and wanted his soup. He swore at the chill as he led the way across the marsh while she followed in his tracks, satisfied with his promise of the dress and shoes. She wanted a blue dress and she had seen the shoes that pleased her some months before in the grocery at Pont du Sable when a dog and she had dragged a fisherwoman in her cart for their board and lodging.
By the time they reached the forks of the stream the rising sun had melted the blanket of the mist until it lay over the desolate prairie in thin rifts of rose vapour.