"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.
"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of men."
His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.
"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do they, then, so hate me?"
The old man stroked his beard.
"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not believe him."
She mused over the saying; silent still.
The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air, mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the shelter of the grass, and bore it away within his talons.
Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.
"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'——"