Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/73

Rh first marriage, he did not die before bestowing upon her a number of brothers and sisters. Blandine's stepmother wore her out with work and blows. She was plucky and stoical, a perfect drudge not only did she assist her second mother in the household work, washing, watching over, and attending to the children, but she worked besides in the kitchen-garden, looked after the cows, and went every week on foot to the town to market, laden with pitchers of milk and hampers of vegetables.

In the solitary hours of later years, bent over her sewing, Blandine must have often recalled her native village, and above all her father's thatch-roofed cottage.

This was covered with moss and house-leeks; the weather-eaten walls concealing their cracks behind an entanglement of honeysuckle and wild vine. In the yard the pigs gambolled by the dung-heap, among fowls which they scare and white pigeons which fly away on to the roof, making a plaintive rustle with their wings, a black dog, closely clipped, of the race of spits, at once a good watch-dog and a strong beast of burden, was yawning in its kennel, and through the open cat-hole in the stable door 4