She cared for her soul—cared very much, and tried to save it; but cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was natural: she tricked the fatherless child in his measure of milk for the tenth of a sou, and wrung the throat of the bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the tenth of a cherry.
Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her hand on the sleeper.
"Wake! I want a word with you."
Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, and gasped in horrible fear.
Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth.
"Listen! The night I was brought here you stole the sequins off my head. Give them back to me now, or I will kill you where you lie."
The grip of her left hand on the woman's throat, and the gleam of her knife in the right, were enough, as she had counted they would be.
Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove to scream, and swore her innocence of this theft which had waited eleven years to rise against her to Mary and her angels; but in the end she surrendered, and tottered on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and with terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole in the rafters of the floor the little chain of shaking sequins.
It had been of no use to her: she had always thought it of inestimable value, and could never bring herself to part from it, visiting it night and day, and being perpetually tormented with the dread lest her master should discover and claim it.
Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed—a quiet cold laugh—at the threats and imprecations of the woman who had robbed her in her infancy.