The mayor glared at her, but she tossed her head and laughed.
“Ho fois! Everybody knows what you are,” sniffed the mayor—“and nobody cares, either,” he muttered, waddling past me, telegram in hand.
The child, quite unconcerned, fell into step beside me, saying, confidentially: “When I was little I used to cry when they talked to me like that. But I don’t now; I’ve made up my mind that they are no better than I.”
“I don’t know why anybody should abuse you,” I said, loudly enough for the mayor to hear. But that functionary waddled on, puffing, muttering, stopping every now and then in the narrow cliff-path to strike flint to tinder or to refill the tiny bowl of his pipe, which a dozen puffs always exhausted.
“Oh, they all abuse us,” said the child, serenely. “You see, you are a stranger and don’t understand; but you will if you live here.”
“Why is everybody unkind to you?” I asked, after a moment.
“Why? Oh, because I am what I am and my father is the Lizard.”
“A poacher?”
“Ah,” she said, looking up at me with delicious malice, “what is a poacher, monsieur?”
“Sometimes he’s a fine fellow gone wrong,” I said, laughing. “So I don’t believe any ill of your father, or of you, either. Will you drum for me, Jacqueline?”