She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with a glow at her heart.
"What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she asks for such as the Prince Sartorian?" said the women, crossing themselves, repentant that they had so far forgotten themselves as to hold any syllable of converse with the devil's daughter.
An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low in his throat:
"Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more gold for new faces than for old coins; and—how handsome she is, the black-browed witch!"
She had passed away through the crowds of the market, and did not hear.
"I go to Rioz myself in two days' time with the mules," she thought; and her heart rose, her glance lightened, she moved through the people with a step so elastic, and a face so radiant from the flush of a new hope, that they fell away from her with an emotion which for once was not wholly hatred.
That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the moonbeams fell through all its small dim windows and checkered all its wooden floors, she rose from the loft where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the steep stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept.
It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and a casement that was never unclosed.
On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap of the woman's working-dress. In a corner was a little image of a saint and a string of leaden beads.
On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired out with the labor of a long day's work among the cabbage-beds and rows of lettuces, muttering as she slept of the little daily peculations that were the sweet sins of her life and of her master's.