"Some evil, no doubt," answered her assistant, a stalwart wench, who was skinning a rabbit in the yard. "You know, she sells bags of wind to founder the ships, they say, and the wicked herb, bon plaisir, and the philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a cajote."
Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:
"No one would ask the road there for any good; that is sure. No doubt she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all the Arts!"
Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.
In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things—girls' faces, coils of foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown waters;—things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of genius.
She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded slopes,—those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince Sartorian.
One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load of live poultry, looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his wife:
"There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his velvet-lined cupboards."
And the wife laughed in answer,—
"Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys."