Page:Gilbert Parker--The Lane that had No Turning.djvu/158

142 heart beat furiously, whose foot tapped the ground angrily—a black-haired, brown-eyed farmer’s daughter, who instantly hated the yellow hair and rosy and golden face of the blue-eyed London lady; who could, that instant, have torn the silk gown from her graceful figure.

She was not disturbed without reason. And for the moment, even when she heard impertinent and incredulous fellows pooh-poohing the monument, and sharpening their rather dull wits upon its corners, she did not open her lips, when otherwise she would have spoken her mind with a vengeance; for Jeanne Marchand had a reputation for spirit and temper, and she spared no one when her blood was up. She had a touch of the vixen—an impetuous, loving, forceful mademoiselle, in marked contrast to the rather ascetic François, whose ways were more refined than his origin might seem to warrant.

"Sapré!" said Duclosse the mealman of the monument; "it’s like a timber of cheese stuck up. What’s that to make a fuss about?"

"Fig of Eden," muttered Jules Marmotte, with one eye on Jeanne, "any fool could saw a better-looking thing out of ice!"

"Pish," said fat Caroche the butcher, "that François has a rattle in his capote. He’d spend his time better chipping bones on my meat-block."

But Jeanne could not bear this—the greasy whopping butcher-man!

"What, what, the messy stupid Caroche, who can’t write his name," she said in a fury; "the sausage-potted Caroche, who doesn’t remember that François Lagarre made his brother’s tombstone, and charged him nothing for the verses he wrote for it, nor for the Agnus