This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful scarlet lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though she hated men she told them never a lie, and asked them never an alms.
She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert women, and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.
She was friendless and desolate; she was ill fed, she was heavily tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words; hunger, and thirst, and chastisement.
Yet for all that she sang;—sang because the vitality in her made her dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made her glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not wholly cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze, the liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.
Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was breaking stones.
His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust was still thick on the leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the people had raised it; and the prayers and the chants had failed as yet to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist across the hot unbroken azure of the skies.
Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly; when they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one hand. Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any proscription overlong.
The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who had grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to believe that he had served hell.
With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the people had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found each other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love between them.
"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her, as she passed him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.