"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil—anything,—except now and then an honest woman."
But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old grandam and the year-old infant.
When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to raise herself from the floor, and had failed.
She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first sharp moment of the persecution.
As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.
It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.
She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.
"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known how they pay any good done to them."
She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid with.
She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without her vengeance.