All that afternoon and evening I wandered about in the neighbourhood of the little hill. I was hot and angry--after a humorous fashion--with myself rather than with Carinne. If I had chosen to invest my self-imposed knight-errantry with a purely fictitious order of merit, I could hardly blame the girl for declining to recognise its title to respect. At the same time, while I assured myself I detested her, I could not refrain from constantly speculating as to the nature of her present reflections. Was she still haughtily indignant at my insistence, or inclined to secret heart-searchings in the matter of her rather cavalier rejection of my services? Like a child, I wished her, I think, to be a little sorry, a little unaccountably sad over the memory of the stranger who had come and gone like a sunbeam shot through the melancholy of her days. I wished her to have reason to regret her unceremonious treatment of me. I did _not_ wish her to overlook my visit altogether--and this, it would appear, was just what she was doing. For, when I once, somewhere about the fall of dusk, climbed softly to the top of the hillock to get view of her, perchance, from ambush, I was positively incensed to hear her voice coming up to me in a little placid song or chant that was in itself an earnest of her indifference and serenity. She sat against a tree at the foot of the slope, and all about her, uncouthly dumped on the fallen mast, were a score of drowsy pigs. She sang to them like Circe, while they twitched lazy ears or snapped their little springs of tails; and the sunset poured from the furnace-mouth of the valley and made her pale face glorious. Now she did her beauty more justice by voice than by brush, though in each art she was supremely artless; but there was a note of nature in the first that was like the winter song of a robin. And presently she trilled a little childish _chansonnette_ of the peasants that touched me because I had some memory of it:-- The little bonne, Marie, (_À moi, mon poupon!_) Spoke to her doll so wee: (_À moi, mon poupon!_) “Hush, little son, sweet thing! But wouldst thou be a king?” (_À moi, mon poupon!_) “Thy sceptre grows in the mere,” (_À moi, mon poupon!_) “Thy crown in the blossoming brere.” (_À moi, mon poupon!_) “For orb a grape shall stand Clutched in thy tiny hand.” (_À moi, mon poupon!_) A rose she pinned at his side, (_À moi, mon poupon!_) And one to each foot she tied; (_À moi, mon poupon!_) His cot she lined with rue, And she named him her _Jésus_. (_À moi, mon poupon!_) I lay amongst the branches that night, with the memory of the low, sweet voice and the strange picture in my brain. And, as I tossed, literally, on my timber couch, a weirder fancy would come to me of the elfish swineherd sleeping within her charmed circle of hogs--fearless and secure--mingling her soft expression of rest with their truculent breathings.