Out she slipped, in the sweet, fresh morning.  No-one saw her go, for the village was a busy place at all times, and at this early hour every man and woman was busy in barn or kitchen.  At one house a child knocked at the window, a child for whom she had played and sung many times.  He stood there in his little red nightgown, and nodded and laughed; and Marie nodded back, smiling, and wondered if he would ever run away, and ever know how good, how good it was, to be alone, with no one else in the world to say, “Do this!” or “Do that!” Just as she came out, the sun rose over the hill, and looking at the fiery ball Marie perceived that it danced in the sky.  Yes, assuredly, so it was!  There was the same wavering motion that she had seen on every fair Easter Day that she could remember.  She thought how Mere Jeanne had first called her attention, to it, when she was little, little, just able to toddle, and had told her that the sun danced so on Easter Morning, for joy that the Good Lord had risen from the dead; and so it was a lesson for us all, and we must dance on Easter Day, if we never danced all the rest of the year.  Ah, how they danced at home there in the village!  But now, it was not Easter at all, and yet the sun danced; what should it mean?  And it came to Marie’s mind that perhaps the Good Lord had told it to dance, for a sign to her that all would go well, and that she was doing quite right to run away from persons with the evil eye.  When you came to think of it, what was more probable?  They always said, those girls in the village, that the saints did the things they asked them to do.  When Barbe lost her gold earring, did not Saint Joseph find it for her, and tell her to look among the potato-parings that had been thrown out the day before? and there, sure enough, it was, and the pigs never touching it, because they had been told not to touch!  Well, and if the saints could do that, it would be a pity indeed if the Good Lord could not make the sun dance when he felt like doing a kind thing for a poor girl.

With the dazzle of that dancing sun still in her eyes, with happy thoughts filling her mind, Marie turned the corner of the straggling road that was called a street by the people who lived along it,—­turned the corner, and almost fell into the arms of a man, who was coming in the opposite direction.  Both uttered a cry at the same moment:  Marie first giving a little startled shriek, but her voice dying away in terrified silence as she saw the man’s face; the latter uttering a shout of delight, of fierce and cruel triumph, that rang out strangely in the quiet morning air.  For this was Le Boss!

A man with a bloated, cruel face, sodden with drink and inflamed with all fierce and inhuman passions; a strong man, who held the trembling girl by the shoulder as if she were a reed, and gazed into her face with eyes of fiendish triumph; an angry man, who poured out a torrent of furious words, reproaching, threatening, by turns, as he found his victim once more within his grasp, just when he had given up all hope of finding her again.  Ah, but he had her now, though! let her try it again, to run away! she would find even this time that she had enough, but another time—­and on and on, as a coarse and brutal man can go on to a helpless creature that is wholly in his power.