She was seated on the mud floor, with a rush-light before her, and on either side of her a high-piled heap of refuse and rubbish. From one of these, at the moment I caught sight of her, she was sorting things--horrible filthy sweepings of road or floor--to the other; shaking and sifting each article as she passed it across, and then taking up another and repeating the action with it, and so on--all minutely, warily, with an air of so much patience and persistence that I stood wondering. Some things--rags--she held up between her eyes and the light, some she passed through her fingers, some she fairly tore in pieces. And all the time her husband stood watching her greedily, my platter still in his hand, as if her strange occupation fascinated him. I stood looking, also, for half a minute, perhaps; then the man’s eye, raised for a single second to the door-way, met mine. He started, muttered something to his wife, and, quick as thought, he kicked the light out, leaving the shed in darkness. Cursing him for an ill-conditioned fellow, I walked back to the fire, laughing. In a twinkling he followed me, his face dark with rage. ‘VENTRE-SAINT-GRIS!’ he exclaimed, thrusting himself close to me. ‘Is not a man’s house his own?’ ‘It is, for me,’ I answered coolly, shrugging my shoulders. ‘And his wife: if she likes to pick dirty rags at this hour, that is your affair.’ ‘Pig of a spy!’ he cried, foaming with rage. I was angry enough at bottom, but I had nothing to gain by quarrelling with the fellow; and I curtly bade him remember himself. ‘Your mistress gave you orders,’ I said contemptuously. ‘Obey them.’ He spat on the floor, but at the same time he grew calmer. ‘You are right there,’ he answered spitefully. ‘What matter, after all, since you leave to-morrow at six? Your horse has been sent down, and your baggage is above.’ ‘I will go to it,’ I retorted. ‘I want none of your company. Give me a light, fellow!’ He obeyed reluctantly, and, glad to turn my back on him, I went up the ladder, still wondering faintly, in the midst of my annoyance, what his wife was about that my chance detection of her had so enraged him. Even now he was not quite himself. He followed me with abuse, and, deprived by my departure of any other means of showing his spite, fell to shouting through the floor, bidding me remember six o’clock, and be stirring; with other taunts, which did not cease until he had tired himself out.