Nance slipped her dress over her head and, under cover of it, dropped
off her wet undergarment, coolly wrung it out, put on her cloak and
walked away, Julie raging alongside with wild words that tumbled over
one another in their haste.
Nance walked to the highest point behind Breniere, and waved her white
garment a dozen times to let Gard know she was safe, and then turned and
set off home through the waist-high bracken and the great cushions of
gorse. And close alongside her went Julie, raging and raving the worse
for her silence; for there is nothing so galling to an angry soul as to
find its most venomous shafts fall harmless from the triple mail of
quiet self-possession.
So they came through the other cottages to La Closerie, but the
neighbours were all asleep, and those who woke at the sound of her
violence, turned over and said, "It's only that mad Frenchwoman in one
of her tantrums. Why, in Heaven's name, can't she go to sleep, like
other folks?"
Nance went into her own house and quietly closed the door. Julie
hammered on it with her fists, as she would dearly have liked to hammer
on Nance's face, and then cursed herself off into her own place,
slamming the door with such violence as to waken all the fowls and set
all the pigs grunting in their sleep.
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