Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and morning, blessed the saints for the renewed safety of his dwelling, and cast forth the poisoned wheat as a thank-offering to the male birds who were forever flying to and fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled even in their glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft bright eyes grew dull in death ere even they had looked upon the springtide sun.
For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise God.
She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and full of remorse.
"Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never have perished," she thought, as she saw the rosy throats of the robins and bullfinches turned upward in death on the turf.
She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart.
The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the innocent creatures of the animal world oppressed her with its heavy and hideous injustice. Their God was good, they said: yet for her sin and her grandsire's greed the harmless song-birds died by the score in torment.
"How shall a God be good who is not just?" she thought. In this mute young lonely soul of hers Nature had sown a strong passion for justice, a strong instinct towards what was righteous.
As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground will, by sheer instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and thrust them through crevices and dust, and the close structure of mortared stones, until they reach the light and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature strive, of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; towards those moral laws which in all ages and all lands remain the same, no matter what deity be worshiped, or what creed be called the truth.
Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewildered, perplexed, even like the plant which, forcing itself upward from its cellar, opens its leaves not in pure air and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke and fetid odors of a city.
Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was somewhere; and as vaguely sought it.