A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to her through the clouds of driven snow-spray.
"Hush, it is I! I—Folle-Farine. I have brought you my food. It is not much—they never give me much. Still it will help a little. I heard what you said—I was in the loft. Flamma must not know; he might make you pay. But it is all mine, truly mine; take it."
"Food—for the children!"
The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to her.
But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a groan—her limb was broken.
Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a hawk's through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.
"You cannot get up; you are old," she said abruptly. "See—let me carry you home. The children! yes, the children can have it. It is not much; but it will serve."
She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion. What was it to her whether any of these people lived or died? They had always mocked and hated her.
"If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their corpses," she thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her Oriental blood.
Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to the bone, and was devoured with ravenous hunger.