After awhile the song ceased; the pain she suffered stifled her voice despite herself; she felt giddy and sick, but she sat there still in the shadow, holding on by the jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam and eddy below.
The hours went away; the golden day died; the grayness of evening stole the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the great lilies gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away over the fields.
The miller stopped the gear of the mill; the grindstones and the water-wheels were set at rest; the peace of the night came down; the pigeons flew to roost in their niches; but the sacks still lay unearned on the grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes about them.
The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at her where she sat aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves.
"Come down and carry these sacks, little brute," he said. "If not—no supper for you to-night."
Folle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the huge black pile slowly, her bands crossed behind her back, her head erect, her eyes glancing like the eyes of a wild hawk.
She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew-laden turf, through the tufts of the lilies, and so silently into the house.
The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean as a watercress, filled with the pungent odor of dried herbs, and furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, and with pinewood trestles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steaming milk, some rolls of black bread, and a big dish of stewed cabbages. At the meal there was already seated a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old serving-woman, clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of Normandy.
The miller stayed the child at the threshold.
"Little devil—not a bit nor drop to-night if you do not carry the sacks."