She shook her head.
"It is nothing."
"Nothing? You have fallen or been ill treated, surely?"
"The people struck me."
"Struck you? With what?"
"Stones."
"And why?"
"I am Folle-Farine."
She answered him with the quiet calm of one who offers an all-sufficient reply.
But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too shunned by the populace, who dreaded the evil genius which they attributed to him, to have been told by them of their fancies and their follies; and he had never essayed to engage either their companionship or their confidence. To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undisturbed was the uttermost that he had ever asked of any strange people amidst whom he had dwelt.