So she went on through Ottignies and La Roche to Villers, and left the great woods and the city chimes behind her, and came through the green abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and Fleurus, and so into the coal and iron fields that lie round Charleroi.

Here her heart grew sick, and her courage sank under the noise and the haste, before the blackness and the hideousness.  She had never seen anything like it.  She thought it was hell, with the naked, swearing, fighting people, and the red fires leaping night and day.  Nevertheless, if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her and him, she found force to brave and cross it.

The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers, rough and fierce and hard, frightened her.  The women did not look like women, and the children ran and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her.  The soil was thick with dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown.  There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness.  Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against hunger and death.

She got through it somehow, hiding often from the ferocious youngsters, and going sleepless rather than lie in those dens of filth; but she seemed so many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last behind her,—­so many, many years older than when she had sat and spun in the garden at home.

When she was once in the valley of the Sambre she was more herself again, only she felt weaker than she had ever done, because she only dared to spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so little food.

In the woods and fields about Alne she began to breathe again, like a bird loosed to the air after being shut in a wooden trap.  Green corn, green boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church bells, humming of golden bees, cradle songs of women spinning, homely odors of little herb gardens and of orchard trees under cottage walls,—­these had been around her all her life; she only breathed freely among them.

She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes were wearing so thin that the hot dust of the road at noonday burnt her feet through them.  Sometimes, too, she felt a curious brief faintness, such as she had never known, for the lack of food and the long fatigue began to tell even on her hardy little body.

But she went on bravely, rarely doing less than her twenty miles a day, and sometimes more, walking often in the night to save time, and lying down in cow-sheds or under haystacks in the noontide.

For the most part people were kind to her; they saw she was so very young and so poor.

Women would give her leave to bathe herself in their bedchambers, and children would ask her to wait on the village bench under the chestnut-tree, while they brought her their pet lamb or their tumbler pigeons to look at, but, for the most part—­unless she was very, very tired—­she would not wait.  It took her so long, and who could tell how it fared with him in Paris?