"Yes."
"And why didn't you answer?"
There was silence.
She took the kettle off the tripod and poured the water, which was boiling, into a stewpan, from which rose the fragrant scent of elder flowers.
"You'll allow me at least to take the woman her tea?" she said. "The poor thing has such shivering fits."
And without waiting for his response she went out at the door, holding the handle of the hot stewpan deftly between two fingers.
Leo devoured with his eyes the slender virginal figure in its rough costume as it disappeared into the darkness.
He seated himself on an oak stump which, chopped up, was used for firewood, and let his fingers idly run along the teeth of the hatchet, turned into an instrument of gold by the flickering firelight.
The St. Bernard looked up at him with intelligent eyes.
"Like a fairy tale," she had said. And this was like being in a fairy tale, too. The walls were covered with rough household utensils. The huge open chimney-place was all encrusted with glittering flakes of soot that struggled upwards in fantastic zigzag shapes, and when loosened from the velvet cloud of smoke, rained down on to the hearth in a shower of metallic scales. Above the fire of crackling logs, along which the blue flames greedily felt their way before plunging into their heart, the steaming flower-patterned blouse belonging to the careless child wreathed the hearth with a festive-looking garland. The quivering reflection of the flames shot up brilliantly and filled the room one moment, the next they sank, giving place to dark shadows, his own shadow most conspicuous, magnified to gigantic proportions on the wall and rising to the ceiling, with a black hatchet grasped in his hand ... a grim sentinel.