But as she asked the question and before Laure could answer it, another woman who had mounted higher than the other looked over the balustrade rail, and calling down, said:
"She is attending a convict who has been struck; who is, a monk said, doomed. He fell in the Flower Market, writhing. One who was engaged in walling up the doors of the infected houses. I saw her half-an-hour ago."
Then descending a few steps of the stairs, so that now she stood but little above where Laure was, she continued:
"The man wanders in his mind. He told Marion that your husband had come here to seek for you in Marseilles; that he knew him; that he had seen and recognised him."
"My husband has come here!--it is true--and has found me God be praised," while, as she spoke, there was a look of such supreme happiness in her eyes, on her whole face, that the other women could not withdraw their gaze from her. "He has found me. Yet, how can this stricken man, this galley slave, know him?"
"He says he does; and avers that it is so. He says, too, he must see him ere he dies."
Then, because the woman was one who was more righteously sentenced to deportation than most who had toiled in her company from Paris to Marseilles, she having been a thief and a receiver of stolen goods for many years in the Capital, she lowered her voice as she said:
"If he is here, best bid him go see the dying man. He may know of hidden goods, of appropriated treasure securely put away, of wealth easily to be acquired. Tell your husband, if he is in truth his friend, if he has any such a friend----"
"My husband the friend of such as that!" Laure exclaimed. "God forbid! He is an honest man! A gentleman!"
"All our husbands are!" the woman exclaimed with a grimace. "We can all say that! Yet they cannot preserve us from such a fate as this!" and she turned and recommenced the ascent of the stairs.