"How can you complain of me, without telling also of your own old sin?" she said, with contempt, as she quitted the chamber. "Shriek away as you choose: the chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; I am strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or you will have the worst of the reckoning."
And she shut the door on the old woman's screams and left her, knowing well that Pitchou would not dare to summon her master.
It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark.
She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back to her own bed of hay in the loft.
There was no sound in the darkness but the faint piping of young birds that felt the coming of day long ere the grosser senses of humanity could have seen a glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern clouds.
She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.
As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a strong emotion came over her.
The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment revived for her.
The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music, the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the hill-passes, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters,—all arose to her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile had buried them.
The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins, she thought of Phratos.