Picture a sunset in the Pyrenees, a glorious crimson sky tipping the distant peaks with pale pink, and deepening the purple shadows on the nearer mountains--the mountains that inclose and overtop Margotte Nevaire's pretty home. I had come for a quiet month to this picturesque, secluded village, and though my month was over, I was tempted to linger day after day, for the sake of the sunshine and the mountains, and not least, perhaps, for the sake of these two peasant girls, with whom I lodged.
Margotte was the youngest of the two by fifteen years--the three boys who came between had died--and though it is very long since we leaned side by side over the white palings, I can always call her to mind as she stood knitting there.
She was tall and strong, and finely made, with a clear white skin, and brown hair waving in heavy masses under her white starched caps. She had beautiful eyes, heavy-lidded and dark-lashed, and a firm, sweet mouth--such a woman as you see sometimes amongst the desolate mountains, as if God had given to them a grander soul, to compensate for the blessings He denied.
Léontine was different; tall too, and active, but with heavier movements, and more of firmness than of sweetness in her scarred face. She had no girlish vanity in her glossy hair, or the cap starched to such absolute perfection, for so much of her youth and beauty had vanished with that scar--a deep blue line from brow to chin--that no loving arrangement of the hair by Margotte's deft fingers could hide.
So Margotte said to me that evening, dropping her knitting into her apron pocket: "I will tell you the story of the wolf, madame. Léontine is out, and it is a grand story--a story I should like you to hear."
"It was night," said Margotte, "a cruel, cold winter night, such as we who live amongst the mountains have terrible cause to dread, for it means hunger and cold--sometimes absolute famine. It means the children crying for food when there is none to give them, and the wolves howling in the distance. Ah! those wolves, madame, how they make one shudder with their monotonous howls, that seem so near at first, and then die away into the far distance!
"Well, it was night, as I have said, and the baby was asleep, as it might be here, and Léontine was knitting on the hearth, and Marcelle, a friend of Léontine's, was chattering to her, kneeling on the stones, and the door was on the latch.