The sennerin, laughing aloud, confirmed his report with many nods and shrugs, and much good-humoured merriment. It amused her to see the stranger’s half-incredulous astonishment.
“And aren’t you frightened?” Florian asked, Will interpreting the question for him.
The sennerin laughed the bare idea to scorn. “Why should I be?” she exclaimed, brimming over with smiles of naïve surprise at such a grotesque notion. “There are plenty more girls in all the other huts on the alps round about. This hut’s Andreas Hausberger’s, and so are that and that. He owns all these pastures; we come up and herd cows for him.”
“Isn’t it terribly lonely, though?” Florian inquired with open eyes, reflecting silently to himself that after all there were advantages—of a sort—in Bond Street.
“Lonely!” the sennerin cried, in her own country dialect. “We’ve no time to be lonely. We have to mind the cows, don’t you see, worthy well-born Herr, and give milk to the calves, and make cheese and butter, and clean our pots and pans, and do everything ourselves for our food and washing. I can tell you we’re tired enough when the day’s well over, and we can creep into our loft, and fall asleep on the straw there.”
“And she has no Society?” Florian exclaimed, all aghast at the thought. For to him the companionship of his brother man, and perhaps even more of his sister woman, was a necessary of existence.
The girl’s eye brightened with an unwonted fire as Will explained the remark to her. “Ah, yes,” she said half-saucily, with a very coquettish toss of her pretty black head; “when Saturday night comes round then sure enough our mountain lads climb up from the valley below to visit us. We have Sunday to ourselves—and them—till Monday morning; for you know the song says—” and she trilled it out archly in clear, quick notes—
“With my pouch unhung,
And my rifle slung,
And away to my black-eyed alp-girl!”