While the old cronies shook their heads, muttering that it was true, there had always been something uncanny about Antoine:  and see the way he would draw the fish into his net, against their own better sense:  it was plain there was something in Antoine they dared not resist:—­old Aimee hobbled out with her stick and sabots, without saying a word, went round to the open door of the next cottage, and peered round the rough wooden partition that screened off the inner half of the room.  On a settle beside the hearth, where a cauldron was boiling, sat Jeanne, the sorceress, with her absorbed, concentrated air, as though her thoughts were fixed on something which she could communicate to no one:  she turned her strange, bright eyes on the figure in the entrance, without change of expression, and waited for Aimee to speak.

Aimee’s face was like a cut diamond, so keen and bright was it, as leaning on her stick, which she struck on the floor from time to time with the emphasis of her speech, she said in her shrill Breton tones:—­

“Mademoiselle Jeanne, I have come to ask of you what evil lie it is that you have told to the child Marie, that lies on her death-bed yonder.  Come.  You have been bribed by Geoffroi, that I know, and a son will purchase snuff, and for that you will sell your soul.  Good—­It is for you to do what you will with your own affairs:  but when you cause an injury to my belle-fille, so that she becomes like a mad woman and dies, I come to ask you for an account of what you have done, Mademoiselle:  that you may undo what you have done, while there is yet time, Mademoiselle.”

Jeanne’s thin, stern lips trembled, almost as if in fear, as she listened to Aimee.  She turned her shaking head slowly towards her, then fixed her deep eyes on hers, and said: 

“I have warned your belle-fille, that she may be saved.  It was my love for her.  Let her have nought to do with Them that dwell in the rocks and the trunks of the great trees.”

Old Aimee shook her stick on the floor with rage.

“Impious and wicked woman!  Confess, I say, or I will tell the good cure, who knows your tricks, and he will not give you absolution; and then the Evil Ones will have their way with you yourself, for what shall save you from them?”

The thin lips in the strange face trembled more.  “The old sorceress dwells alone, abandoned of all,” she murmured.  “If she take not a sou when one or another will give it her, how shall she contrive to live?”

“What is it,” demanded Aimee, with increasing shrillness, “that you have told the child Marie about my grandson?”

A look of cunning suddenly drove away the expression of conscious guilt in Jeanne’s face.  She dropped her eyes on the floor, mumbled inarticulately a moment, and then said shiftily, “You have perhaps a few sous in your pocket, Madame, to show good-will to the sorceress; for without good-will she cannot tell you what you seek to know.”