As they turned away, they saw a peasant woman coming toward the house, carrying two tin pails, which appeared to be heavy and which glistened brightly in the sunlight.
She limped with her right leg, and in her brown knitted jacket, that was faded by the sun and washed out by the rain, she looked like a poor, wretched, dirty servant.
“Here is mamma,” the child said.
When she got close to the house, she looked at the strangers angrily and suspiciously, and then she went in, as if she had not seen them. She looked old and had a hard, yellow, wrinkled face, one of those wooden faces that country people so often have.
Monsieur d'Apreval called her back.
“I beg your pardon, madame, but we came in to know whether you could sell us two glasses of milk.”
She was grumbling when she reappeared in the door, after putting down her pails.
“I don't sell milk,” she replied.
“We are very thirsty,” he said, “and madame is very tired. Can we not get something to drink?”
The peasant woman gave them an uneasy and cunning glance and then she made up her mind.