A great purpose nerves the life it lives in, so that no personal terrors can assail, nor any minor woes afflict it. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, hardship, danger,—these were all in her path, and she had each in turn; but not one of them unnerved her.
To reach Paris, she felt that she would have walked through flames, or fasted forty days.
For two days and nights she went on—days cloudless, nights fine and mild; then came a day of storm—sharp hail and loud thunder. She went on through it all the same; the agony in her heart made the glare of lightning and the roar of winds no more to her than the sigh of an April breeze over a primrose bank.
She had various fortunes on her way.
A party of tramps crossing a meadow set on her, and tried to insult her; she showed them her knife, and, with the blade bare against her throat, made them fall back, and scattered them.
A dirty and tattered group of gypsies, swatting in a dry ditch under a tarpaulin, hailed her, and wanted her to join with them and share their broken food. She eluded them with disgust; they were not like the gitanos of the Liebana, and she took them to be beggars and thieves, as, indeed, they were.
At a little wayside cabin, a girl, with a bright rosy face, spoke softly and cheerily to her, and bade her rest awhile on the bench in the porch under the vines; and brought out some white pigeons to show her; and asked her, with interest, whence she came. And she, in her fierceness and her shyness, was touched, and wondered greatly that any female thing could be thus good.
She met an old man with an organ on his back, and a monkey on his shoulder. He was old and infirm. She carried his organ for him awhile, as they went along the same road; and he was gentle and kind in return, and made the route she had to take clear to her, and told her, with a shake of his head, that Paris would be either hell or heaven to such as she. And she, hearing, smiled a little, for the first time since she had left Yprès, and thought—heaven or hell, what would it matter which, so long as she found Arslàn?
Of Dante she had never heard; but the spirit of the "questi chi mai da me non piu diviso" dwells untaught in every great love.
Once, at night, a vagrant tried to rob her, having watched her count the gold and notes which she carried in her girdle. He dragged her to a lonely place, and snatched at the red sash, grasping the money with it; but she was too quick for him, and beat him off in such a fashion that he slunk away limping, and told his fellows to beware of her; for she had the spring of a cat, and the stroke of a swan's wing.