In her youth Madame Degardy was pretty and much admired. Her lover had
deserted her, and in a fit of mad indignation and despair she had fled
from the village, and vanished no one knew where, though it had been
declared by a wandering hunter that she had been seen in the far-off
hills that march into the south, and that she lived there with a
barbarous mountaineer, who had himself long been an outlaw from his kind.
But this had been mere gossip, and after twenty-five years she came back
to Pontiac, a half-mad creature, and took up the thread of her life
alone; and Parpon and the Cure saw that she suffered nothing in the hard
winters.
Valmond left the river-men to the tyranny of her tongue and stick, and
came on to where the red light of the forge showed through the smithy
window. As he neared the door, he heard a voice singularly sweet, and
another of commoner calibre was joining in the refrain of a song:
"'Oh, traveller, see where the red sparks rise,'
(Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
But dark is the mist in the traveller's eyes.
(Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
'Oh, traveller, see far down the gorge,
The crimson light from my father's forge.
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