"You gave him a handful of gold pieces for that!"
"Ah! if you thought that I should offer him the half of my possessions, you were disappointed, no doubt. But you forgot that 'that' would not sell in the world, as yet, for a handful of wheat."
She touched the three sapphires.
"Are your blue stones of less worth, because I, being ignorant, esteem them of no more value than three sparrow's eggs in the hedge?"
"My poor jewels! Well, stay here to-night; you need rest, shelter, and warmth; and to-morrow you shall go as poor as you came, if you wish. But the world is very hard. The world is always winter—to the poor," he added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes upon her.
Despite herself she shuddered; he recalled to her that the world was close at hand—the world in which she would be houseless, friendless, penniless, alone.
"A hard world, to those who will not worship its gods," he repeated, musingly. "And you astray in it, you poor barbarian, with your noble madness, and your blindness of faith and of passion. Do you know what it is to be famished, and have none to hear your cries?"
"Do I know?" her voice suddenly gathered strength and scorn, and rang loud on the stillness. "Do you? The empty dish, the chill stove, the frozen feet, the long nights, with the roof dripping rain, the sour berries and hard roots that mock hunger, the mud floors, with the rats fighting to get first at your bed, the bitter black months, whose saints' days are kept by new pains, and whose holy days are feasted by fresh diseases. Do I know? Do you?"
He did not answer her; he was absorbed in his study of her face; he was thinking how she would look in Paris in some theatre's spectacle of Egypt, with anklets of dull gold and a cymar of dead white, and behind her a sea of palms and a red and sullen sky.
"What a fool he must have been!" he thought, as his eyes went from her to the study of her sleeping in the poppies. "What a fool! he left his lantern of Aladdin behind him."