There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned, and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare, and rioted over by furious cross winds.
Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill,—for the first time since they had had to do with her,—she had committed, for the millionth time, a crime.
There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping, and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.
There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless house.
The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering in its light.
There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought their famine time a good one in which to tempt them with poisoned grain.
She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet her,—a yard farther on she saw him. He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside the old barrel that had served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged him the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those bitter nights; and he had perished quietly without a moan, like a sentinel slain at his post—frozen to death in his old age after a life of faithfulness repaid with blows.
She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He had loved her, and she had loved him; many a time she had risked a stroke of the lash to save it from his body; many a time she had sobbed herself to sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as round her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.
She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead, lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so that he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should be able to make his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of summer liberty and leisure.
She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow above his tomb, under the old twisted pear-tree, beneath which he and she had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another for scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can exist betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone, and love and trust each other only out of all the world.