“Ah! if the devil will but hear my prayer this time,” he cried, as he shook his fist, cursing the while, after the retiring huntsmen, who were just out of view, “if the devil will but hear me, you shall be paid back with usury for all you have made me suffer this day, that I swear.”
“Oh, how wicked it is of you to behave like that!” said Agnelette, going up to him. “The Baron is a kind Lord, very good to the poor, and always gently behaved with women.”
“Quite so, and you shall see with what gratitude I will repay him for the blows he has given me.”
“Come now, frankly, friend, confess that you deserved those blows,” said the girl, laughing.
“So, so!” answered Thibault, “the Baron’s kiss has turned your head, has it, my pretty Agnelette?”
“You, I should have thought, would have been the last person to reproach me with that kiss, Monsieur Thibault. But what I have said, I say again; my Lord Baron was within his rights.”
“What, in belabouring me with blows!”
“Well, why do you go hunting on the estates of these great lords?”
“Does not the game belong to everybody, to the peasant just as much as to the great lords?”
“No, certainly not; the game is in their woods, it is fed on their grass, and you have no right to throw your boar-spear at a buck which belongs to my lord the Duke of Orleans.”
“And who told you that I threw a boar-spear at his buck?” replied Thibault, advancing towards Agnelette in an almost threatening manner.