Rusk nor
Catherine Jones spent sixpence with him;--he was a stupid fellow, or worse.
Of course Madame had tampered with him. But truth, like murder, will out
some day. Tom Williams, the groom, had seen her, when alone with him, and
pretending to look at his stock, with her face almost buried in his silks
and Welsh linseys, talking as fast as she could all the time, and slipping
_money_, he did suppose, under a piece of stuff in his box.
In the mean time, I and Madame were walking over the wide, peaty
sheep-walks that lie between Knowl and Church Scarsdale. Since our visit to
the mausoleum in the wood, she had not worried me so much as before. She
had been, indeed, more than usually thoughtful, very little talkative, and
troubled me hardly at all about French and other accomplishments. A walk
was a part of our daily routine. I now carried a tiny basket in my hand,
with a few sandwiches, which were to furnish our luncheon when we reached
the pretty scene, about two miles away, whither we were tending.
We had started a little too late; Madame grew unwontedly fatigued and sat
down to rest on a stile before we had got half-way; and there she intoned,
with a dismal nasal cadence, a quaint old Bretagne ballad, about a lady
with a pig's head:--
'This lady was neither pig nor maid,
And so she was not of human mould;
Not of the living nor the dead.
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