Peyrol moved briskly towards her. He wasn’t a man to lose time in idle wonder, and his sabots did not seem to weigh heavy on his feet. The fermière, whom the villagers down there spoke of as Arlette as though she had been a little girl, but in a strange tone of shocked awe, walked with her head drooping and her feet (as Peyrol used to say) touching the ground as lightly as falling leaves. The clatter of the clogs made her raise her black, clear eyes that had been smitten on the very verge of womanhood by such sights of bloodshed and terror as to leave in her a fear of looking steadily in any direction for long, lest she should see coming through the empty air some mutilated vision of the dead. Peyrol called it trying not to see something that was not there; and this evasive yet frank mobility was so much a part of her being that the steadiness with which she met his inquisitive glance surprised old Peyrol for a moment. He asked without beating about the bush:
“Did he speak to you?”
She answered with something airy and provoking in her voice, which also struck Peyrol as a novelty: “He never stopped. He passed by as though he had not seen me”—and then they both looked away from each other.
“Now, what is it you took into your head to watch for at night?”
She did not expect that question. She hung her head and took a pleat of her skirt between her fingers, embarrassed like a child.
“Why should I not,” she murmured in a low shy note, as if she had two voices within her.
“What did Catherine say?”
“She was asleep, or perhaps only lying on her back with her eyes shut.”
“Does she do that?” asked Peyrol with incredulity.
“Yes.” Arlette gave Peyrol a queer, meaningless smile with which her eyes had nothing to do. “Yes, she often does. I have noticed that before. She lies there trembling under her blankets till I come back.”