And he laughed his little low laugh in his throat.
Then, and then only, she understood him.
With a sudden unconscious instinctive action her hand sought her knife, but the girdle was empty; she sprang erect, her face on fire with a superb fury, her eyes blazing like the eyes of a wild beast's by night, a magnificence of scorn and rage upon her quivering features.
Her voice rang clear and hard and cold as ring the blows of steel.
"I ask more,—that I should pluck it with clean hands, and eat of it with pure lips. Strange quibble for a beggar,—homeless, penniless, tribeless, nationless! So you think, no doubt. But we who are born outlawed are born free,—and do not sell our freedom. Let me go."
He watched her with a musing smile, a dreamy calm content; all this tempest of her scorn, all this bitterness of her disdain, all this whirlwind of her passion and her suffering, seemed but to beguile him more and make him surer of her beauty, of her splendor, of her strength.
"She would be a great creature to show to the world," he thought, as he drooped his head and watched her through his half-closed eyelids, as the Red Mouse watched the sleeper in the poppies. "Let you go?" he said, with that slow, ironic smile,—"let you go? Why should I let you go, Folle-Farine?"
She stooped as a tigress stoops to rise the stronger for her death spring, and her voice was low, on a level with his ear.
"Why? Why? To save your own life—if you are wise."
He laughed in his throat again.