On the whole, the world seemed better to her than it had done: the men were seldom insolent, taking warning from the look in her flashing eyes and the straight carriage of her flexile frame; and the women more than once were kind.
Many peasants passed her on their market-mules, and many carriers' carts and farm-wagons went by along the sunny roads.
Sometimes their drivers called to her to get up, and gave her a lift of a league or two on their piles of grass, of straw, or among their crates of cackling poultry, as they made their slow way between the lines of the trees, with their horses nodding heavily under the weight of their uncouth harness.
All this while she never touched the gold that he had given her. Very little food sufficed to her: she had been hardily reared; and for the little she had she worked always, on her way.
A load carried, a lost sheep fetched in, some wood hewn and stacked, a crying calf fed, a cabbage-patch dug or watered, these got her the simple fare which she fed on; and for lodging she was to none indebted, preferring to lie down by the side of the cows in their stalls, or under a stack against some little blossoming garden.
The people had no prejudice against her: she found few foes, when she had left the district that knew the story of Reine Flamma; they were, on the contrary, amused with her strange picture-like look, and awed with the sad brevity of her speech to them. Sometimes it chanced to her to get no tasks of any sort to do, and at these times she went without food: touch his gold she would not. On the road she did what good she could; she walked a needless league to carry home a child who had broken his leg in a lonely lane; she sought, in a foggy night, for the straying goat of a wretched old woman; she saved an infant from the flames in a little cabin burning in the midst of the green fields: she did what came in her path to do. For her heart was half broken; and this was her way of prayer.
So, by tedious endeavor, she won her passage wearily towards Paris.
She had been nine days on the road, losing her way at times, and having often wearily to retrace her steps.
On the tenth day she came to a little town lying in a green hollow amidst woods.
It had an ancient church; the old sweet bells were ringing their last mid-day mass, Salutaris hostia; a crumbling fortress of the Angevine kings gave it majesty and shadow; it was full of flowers and of trees, and had quaint, quiet, gray streets, hilly and shady, that made her think of the streets round about the cathedral of her mother's birthplace, away northwestward in the white sea-mists.