the castle for a night's shelter, and the maids flocked to her,
Anne held back. The winter was long and black and rainy. One
day, in Yves de Cornault's absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol
with a troop of performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and
cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one
brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies,
and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them. That
evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found
the dog strangled on her pillow.

After that she said to herself that she would never have another
dog; but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found
whining at the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the
maids to speak of him to her husband. She hid him in a room that
no one went to, smuggled food to him from her own plate, made him
a warm bed to lie on and petted him like a child.

Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the
greyhound strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said
nothing, and resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger
she would never bring him into the castle; but one day she found
a young sheep-dog, a brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying
with a broken leg in the snow of the park. Yves de Cornault was
at Rennes, and she brought the dog in, warmed and fed it, tied up
its leg and hid it in the castle till her husband's return. The
day before, she gave it to a peasant woman who lived a long way
off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say nothing; but
that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door, and
when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped
up on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and