"Because you are Folle-Farine?" he repeated. "Is that a reason to hate you?"
She gave a gesture of assent.
"And you hate them in return?"
She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither all round, as a trapped bird glances, seeking his way outward.
"I think so," she muttered; "and yet I have had their little children in my reach many a time by the water when the woods were all quiet, and I have never killed one yet."
He looked at her more earnestly than he had done before. The repressed passion that glanced under her straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn which curled on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted him; there was a force in them all which aroused his attention. There were in her that conscious power for ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its exercise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the lion; he moved nearer to her, and addressed her more gently.
"Who are you?" he asked, "and why have these people such savage violence against you?"
"I am Folle-Farine," she answered him again, unable to add anything else.
"Have you no other name?"
"No."