All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction.
The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was not gladness, and neither was silence pain.
Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also knew.
"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing sound of the falling hammer.
A smile curled her lips.
"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."
"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh lean face.
He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and left.
"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept over her.
"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could not understand it in connection with herself.