Thus shut in on
all sides, the Clos-Marie slept in the quiet peace of its abandonment,
overrun with weeds and wild grass, planted with poplars and willows sown
by the wind. Among the great pebbles the Chevrotte leaped, singing as it
went, and making a continuous music as if of crystal.
Angelique was never weary of this out-of-the-way nook. Yet for seven
years she had seen there each morning only what she had looked at on the
previous evening. The trees in the little park of the Hotel Voincourt,
whose front was on the Grand Rue, were so tufted and bushy that it
was only in the winter she could occasionally catch a glimpse of the
daughter of the Countess, Mademoiselle Claire, a young girl of her own
age.
In the garden of the Bishop was a still more dense thickness of
branches, and she had often tried in vain to distinguish there the
violet-coloured cassock of Monseigneur; and the old gate, with its
Venetian slats above and at the sides, must have been fastened up for
a very long time, for she never remembered to have seen it opened, not
even for a gardener to pass through. Besides the washerwomen in the
Clos, she always saw the same poor, ragged little children playing or
sleeping in the grass.
The spring this year was unusually mild.
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