This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 Excerpt: … remark, though she asked the name of one thing and another, and how to say this and that in Provencal, and altogether so readily caught the dialect of the Camargue, and seemed so much at home in the farmhouse that Jano Mario, knowing nothing of those first years passed in surroundings not unlike these, was more and more at a loss how to imagine who or what the child could be, and why she had been mysteriously carried off from her family, but she studiously refrained from any inquiries, or from saying a word which could lead her to betray anything about herself, and indeed seldom spoke except in reply to some question asked by Clemence. Perhaps, even if no oppressive mystery had surrounded the child, the constant presence of even so quiet a companion would have fatigued the solitary woman, accustomed to silence and her own thoughts, as she came and went, or sat down when she had a little leisure to spin. She answered whatever she was asked, patiently and gently, yet in a way at once absent and watchful, but Clemence, little used to tenderness, missed nothing. Growing familiar with the place in which she found herself, she went out and in and made acquaintance with the orchard, full of orange-trees whose sweet blossoms were never allowed to turn into fruit, but all went to make perfume, and mulberries whose leaves would all be plucked for the magnans, their sturdy stems garlanded with vines or climbing roses which hung down in cascades of leaf and flower–sweet pink flowers with rosy centres and paler petals outside. Lucerne grew under the trees, bees hummed in the clover. Clemence found a nest in a hole in the wall, empty, for the brood had long flown, and was now climbing and calling and seeking insects in the trees above her head. Overhead was deep blue s…
