Folle-Farine saw nothing.
She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.
Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any other thing than blows.
As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it, though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a passion fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly; and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or not.
It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.
The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.
Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he was weighing corn for the grinding.
"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.
She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.
He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.