Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to go among the world of the sleeping poor, at her threshold she would step on some gift worthy of a queen's acceptance, without date or word, gleaming there against the stone of the stairs.
When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the close of a day, all pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all bootless labor to and fro the labyrinth of streets, there would be on her bare bench such fruits and flowers as Dorothea might have sent from Paradise, and curled amidst them some thin leaf that would have bought the weight of the pines and of the grapes in gold.
When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and footsore, through the byways and over the sharp-set flints of the quarters of the outcasts and the beggars, sick with the tumult and the stench and the squalor, parched with dust, worn with hunger, blind with the endless search for one face amidst the millions,—going home!—oh, mockery of the word!—to a bed of straw, to a cage in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal, to a night of loneliness and cold and misery; at such a moment now and then through the gloom a voice would steal to her, saying,—
"Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?"
But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it any answer.
The mill dust; the reed by the river; the nameless, friendless, rootless thing that her fate made her, should have been weak, and so lightly blown by every chance breeze—so the Red Mouse told her; should have asked no better ending than to be wafted up a little while upon the winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid into a crown of pleasure.
Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet she dared deride her tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong.
For Love was with her.
And though the Red Mouse lies often in Love's breast, and is cradled there a welcome guest, yet when Love, once in a million times, shakes off his sloth, and flings the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with a hand of force; and the beast crouches and flees, and dares meddle with Love no more.
In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather, weather that had the purple glow of the autumnal storms and the chills of coming winter on it, she arose, as her habit was, ere the night was altogether spent, and lit her little taper, and went out upon her rounds to rouse the sleepers.