The farm Cecile meant to reach lay about a mile from the village of Bolleau. It was situated on a pretty rise of ground to the very borders of the forest. Cecile, walking quickly, reached it before long; then she stood still, leaning over the paling and looking across the enchanted ground. This paling in itself was English, and the very strut of the barn-door fowl reminded her of Warren's Grove. How she wished that fair child to run out! How she hoped to hear even one word of the only language she understood! No matter her French origin, Cecile was all English at this moment. Toby stood by her side patiently enough.
Toby, too, was in great trouble and perplexity about Maurice, but his present strongest instinct was to get at a very fat fowl which, unconscious of danger, was scratching up worms at its leisure within almost reach of his nose.
Toby had a weakness, nay, a vice, in the direction of fowl; he liked to hunt them. He could not imagine why Cecile did not go in at that low gate which stood a little open close by. Where was the use of remaining still, in any case, so near temptation? The unwary fowl came close, very close. Toby could stand it no longer. He made a spring, a snap, and caught at its beak.
Then ensued a fuss and an uproar; every fowl in the place commenced to give voice in the cause of an injured comrade. Cackle, cackle, crow, crow, from, it seemed, hundreds of throats. Toby retired actually abashed, and out at the same moment, from under the rose-covered porch, came the pretty fair-haired boy. The child was instantly followed by an old woman, a regular Frenchwoman, upright, straight as a dart, with coal-black eyes and snowy hair tidily put away under a tall peasant's cap.
Cecile heard her utter a French exclamation, then chide pretty sharply the uproarious birds. Toby lying perdu behind the hedge, the fowl were naturally chided for much ado about nothing.
Just then the little boy, breaking from the restraining hand, ran gleefully into a field of waving corn.
"Suzanne, Suzanne!" shouted the Frenchwoman in shrill tones, and then out flew a much younger woman, a woman who seemed, even to the child Cecile, very young indeed. A tall, fair young woman, with a face as pink and white as the boy's, and a wealth of even more golden hair.
"Ah! you naughty little lad. Come here, Jean," she said in English; then catching the truant child to her bosom, she ran back with him into the house.
Cecile felt herself turning cold, almost faint. An impulse to run into that farmhouse, to address that fair-haired young woman, to drag her story, whatever it might be, from her lips, came over her almost too strongly to be resisted.
She might have yielded to it, she was indeed about to yield to it, when suddenly a voice at her elbow, calling her by her name, caused her to look round. There stood Joe, but Joe with a face so altered, so ghastly, so troubled, that Cecile scarcely knew him.