She had barely tasted food for many hours. All the means of subsistence that she had was the few coins earned from those as poor almost as herself. Often these went in debt to her, and begged for a little time to get the piece or two of base metal that they owed her; and she forgave them such debts always, not having the heart to take the last miserable pittance from some trembling withered hand which had worked through fourscore years of toil, and found no payment but its wrinkles in its palm; not having the force to fill her own platter with crusts which could only be purchased by the hunger cries of some starveling infant, or by the barter of some little valueless cross of ivory or rosary of berries long cherished in some aching breast after all else was lost or spent.
She had barely tasted food that day, worst of all she had not had even a few grains to scatter to the hungry pigeons as they had fluttered to her on the housetop in the stormy twilight as the evening fell.
She had lain awake all the night hearing the strokes of the bells sound the hours, and seeming to say to her as they beat on the silence,—
"Dost thou dare to be strong, thou? a grain of dust, a reed of the river, a Nothing?"
When she rose, and drew back the iron staple that fastened her door, and went out on the crazy stairway, she struck her foot against a thing of metal. It glittered in the feeble beams from her lamp. She took it up; it was a little precious casket, such as of old the Red Mouse lurked in, among the pearls, to spring out from their whiteness into the purer snow of Gretchen's bread.
With it was only one written line:
"When you are tired, Folle-Farine?"
She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty weariness of the young lioness starved and cramped in a cage in a city.
An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust her lean bony face, lit with wolf's eyes, through the gloom.
"Are you not tired?" she muttered in the formula taught her. "Are you not tired, Folle-Farine?"