A little distance from her there was a group of joyous singers who looked at her from time to time, their laughter hushing a little, and their simple carousal under the green boughs broken by a nameless chillness and involuntary speculation. She did not note them, her face being bowed down upon her hands, and no sound of the thrushes' song or of the human singers' voices rousing her from the stupefaction of despair which drugged her senses.

They watched her long; her att.i.tude did not change.

One of them at length rose up and went, hesitating, a step or two forwards; a girl with winking feet, clad gayly in bright colors, though the texture of her clothes was poor.

She went and touched the crouched, sad figure softly.

"Are you in trouble?"

The figure lifted its bowed head, its dark, hopeless eyes.

Folle-Farine looked up with a stare and a shiver.

"It is no matter, I am only--tired."

"Are you all alone?"

"Yes."

"Come and sit with us a moment. You are in the damp and the gloom; we are so pleasant and sunny there. Come."

"You are good, but let me be."

The blue-eyed girl called to the others. They lazily rose and came.

"Heaven! she is handsome!" the men muttered to one another.

She looked straight at them all, and let them be.

"You are all alone?" they asked her again.

"Always," she answered them.

"You are going--where?"

"To Paris"

"What to do there?"

"I do not know."

"You look wet--suffering--what is the matter?"

"I was nearly drowned last night--an accident--it is nothing."

"Where have you slept?"

"In a shed: with some cattle."

"Could you get no shelter in a house?"

"I did not seek any."

"What do you do? What is your work?"

"Anything--nothing."

"What is your name?"

"Folle-Farine."

"That means the chaff;--less than the chaff,--the dust."

"It means me."

They were silent, only bending on her their bright curious eyes.

They saw that she was unspeakably wretched; that some great woe or shock had recently fallen on her, and given her glance that startled horror and blanched her rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were, the very current of the young blood in her veins.

They were silent a little s.p.a.ce. Then whispered together.

"Come with us," they urged. "We, too, go to Paris. We are poor. We follow art. We will befriend you."

She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of every human thing.

But they were urgent; they were eloquent; these young girls with their bright eyes; these men who spoke of art; these wanderers who went to the great city.

In the end they pressed on her their companionship. They, too, were going to Paris; they spoke of perils she would run, of vouchers she would need: she wondered at their charity, but in the end walked on with them--fearing the Red Mouse.

They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: they said they followed art; they told her she could never enter Paris nameless and alone: so she went. The chief of the little troop watched wonderingly her step, her posture, her barbaric and l.u.s.trous beauty, brilliant still even through the pallor of grief and the weariness of fatigue; of these he had never seen the like before, and he knew their almost priceless value in the world, and of the working cla.s.ses and street mobs of Paris.

"Listen," he said suddenly to her. "We shall play to-night at the next town. Will you take a part?"

Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost in thought, she started at his voice.

"I do not know what you mean?"

"I mean--will you show yourself with us? We will give you no words. It will be quite easy. What money we make we divide among us. All you shall do shall be to stand and be looked at--you are beautiful, and you know it, no doubt?"

She made a weary sign of a.s.sent. Beautiful? What could it matter if she were so, or if she were not, what the mere thought of it? The beauty that she owned, though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it had been strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in which she cared to rouse a throb of pa.s.sion, since it had been unworthy to draw upon it with any lingering gaze of love the eyes of Arslan.

He looked at her more closely; this was a strange creature, he thought, who, being a woman and in her first youth, could thus acknowledge her own loveliness with so much candor, yet so much indifference.

That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood in a dell across the fields, a small place lying close about a great church tower.

It was almost dusk when they entered it; but it was all alive with lights and shows, and trumpets and banners; it was the day of a great fair, and the merry-go-rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded cakes and puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow streets were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd.

As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad cry rose.