She hung down her head, trembling violently. Jacob had thrust back the hood from her face, and her loosened hair covered her shoulders.
'What does it mean?' I cried, struggling with my bewilderment. 'Why are you here, girl?'
Instead of answering she cowered nearer the wall, and I saw that she was trying to hide something behind her under cover of her cloak.
'What have you got there?' I said quickly, laying my hand on her wrist.
She flashed a look at me, her small teeth showing, a mutinous glare on her little pale face. 'Not my chain!' she snapped.
I dropped her arm and recoiled as if she had struck me; though the words did not so much hurt as surprise me. And I was quick to recover myself. 'What is it, then?' I said, returning to the attack. 'I must know, Marie, and what you are doing here at this time of night.'
As she did not answer I put her cloak aside, and discovered, to my great astonishment, that she was holding a platter full of food. It shook in her hand. She began to cry.
'Heavens, girl!' I exclaimed in my wonder, 'have you not had enough to eat?'
She lifted her head and looked at me through her tears, her eyes sparkling with indignation. 'I have!' she said almost fiercely. 'But what of these?'--and she flung her disengaged hand abroad, with a gesture I did not at once comprehend. 'Can you sleep in their beds, and lie in their houses, and eat from their meal-tubs, and think of them starving, and not get up and help them? Can you hear them whining for food like dogs, and starve them as you would not starve a dog? I cannot. I cannot!' she repeated wildly. 'But you, you others, you of the north, you have no hearts! You lie soft and care nothing!'
'But what--who are starving?' I said in amazement. Her words outran my wits. 'And where is the man in whose bed I am lying?'