“I will ask them to let me stay and keep their sheep.”
They rode on through a fair, smiling country. Garin fell silent and the herd-girl was not talkative. He could not but ride wondering about that knight back there, and who he might be and how powerful. He saw that it was possible that he had provided a hornet’s nest for the ears of Castel-Noir and Foulque. He drew a sigh, half-frighted and half-proud of a proved prowess.
The girl behind him moved slightly. “I had forgot to say it,” she murmured. “I will say it now. Fair sir, I am humbly grateful—”
Garin had a great idiosyncrasy. He disliked to be thanked. “I liked that fighting,” he said. “It was no sacrifice. That is,” he thought, “it will not be if he never find out my name.”
Paladin carried them a way farther. Said Garin, remembering chivalry, “It is man’s part to protect the weaker being, that is woman.”
“It puzzles so!” said the herd-girl. “I am not very weak. Is it man’s part, too, to lay hands upon a woman against her will? If man did not that, then man need not do, at such cost, the other. What credit to put water on the house you yourself set afire?”
“Now by Our Lady,” said Garin, “you are a strange herd-girl!” He twisted in the saddle so that he might look at her. She sat still,—young, slim and forlorn to the eye, dark as a berry, her feet bare and her dress so torn that her limbs showed. Her long, black loosened hair almost hid her face, which seemed thin, with irregular features. She had her distaff still, the forlorn serf’s daughter, herself a serf.
“If we plume ourselves it is a mistake, and foolishness,” said Garin. “But yet though one man act villainously, another may act well.”
“Just,” said the herd-girl. “And I thank the one who has acted well—but not all men. I thank a man, but not mankind.”
“How old are you?”