Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her eyes.
"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.
"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth; enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than himself.
A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief phrases,—
"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is no matter. But it made me late."
In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an unconscious glimmer of appeal,—a vague fancy that for once she might, perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.
But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.
Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have had pity and charity where he had lacked them.
He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her bosom had been stained with blood.
"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be the worse for thee."