She was very sweet and humble to me by-and-by. She made me the _amende honorable_ by calling my heart too great for my body. And at last said she-- “I take you for my knight, monsieur--to honour and protect, to bear with and respect me----” and I kissed her brown hand in allegiance. CHAPTER VIII. QUATREMAINS-QUATREPATTES. “Mademoiselle, what do you weave?” She sat at the entrance to her sleeping-place--a hole under the radiated roots of an ancient oak-tree. We had happened upon the shelter in our league-long flight. It was one of those burrows--those _logettes_ into which past generations of the hunted and proscribed had sunk like moles. Many of our forests are honeycombed with them. Over the opening to this, once concealed by a cunning mat of weeds and branches, the roots had contrived a more enduring cover. Within, to walls and floor, yet clung the remnants of brushwood with which long ago the den had been lined. Carinne was deftly busy over a queer contrivance--a sort of fencing mask that she plaited from thin tendrils of a binding-weed. “Monsieur on his high perch at night will suffer from the mosquitoes?” “Has mademoiselle reason to think so?” “As I think I can tell when a little ape carries a nut in his pouch.” “Alas! but how cynical of romance are the tiny blood-suckers! They fly on a chromatic scale, mademoiselle. Often I try to comfort myself with the fancy that I am listening to the very distant humming of church bells; and then comes a tiny prick, and something seems to rise from my heart to my face, and to blossom thereon. No doubt it is the flowers of fancy budding. And is the weed-bonnet for me?” “I shall not want it in my burrow.” This gave me exquisite gratification, which survived the many inconveniences to which I was put by the bonnet falling off at night, and my having to descend to recover it. But it soon appeared that the least whim of this fascinating child was to be my law. And yet what a dear lawless existence! I do not know what termination to it we foresaw. Sooner or later the cold must drive me from my nightly cradle; sooner or later the good fruits of the earth must wither. In the meantime we were _grillon_ and _cigale_,--we stored not, neither did we labour; but we chatted, and we wandered, and we drew the marrow of every tender berry, and gnawed the rind of every tough, without making faces. And we quarrelled--_mon Dieu!_ but how we quarrelled! Scarce a day passed without dispute, and this in the end it was that resolved the situation for us. For truly my comrade was as full of moods and whimsies as the wind--one moment a curious sweet woman; the next, and on the prick of confidence, a pillar of salt. Yet, even as such, she herself was ever the savour to the insults she made me swallow.