Marguerite Valmond, “la folle” as she was called by the townsfolk, shook her head and smiled cunningly.  She was a tall girl, with black hair disordered and falling loosely about her pale face,—­her eyes were dark and lustrous, but wild, and with a hunted expression in them,—­and her dress was composed of the strangest remnants of oddly assorted materials and colours pinned about her without any order or symmetry, the very idea of decent clothing being hardly considered, as her bosom was half exposed and her legs were bare.  She wore no head-covering, and her whole aspect was that of one who had suddenly awakened from a hideous dream and was striving to forget its horrors.

“I shall never be tired!” she said—­“If I could be tired I should sleep,—­but I never sleep!  I am looking for him, you know!—­it was at the fair I lost him—­you remember the great fair?  And when I find him I shall kill him!  It is quite easy to kill—­you take a sharp glittering thing, so!” and she snatched up a knife that lay on Martine’s counter—­“And you plunge it—­so!” and she struck it down with singular fury through the breast of one of the “dead birds” which were Martine’s stock-in-trade.  Then she threw the knife on the ground—­rubbed her hands together, tossed her head, and laughed again—­“That is how I shall do it when I meet him!”

Martine said nothing.  She simply removed the one stabbed bird from among the others, and setting it aside, picked up the knife from the ground and went on knitting as calmly as ever.

“I am going to see the Archbishop,” proceeded Marguerite, tossing back her dishevelled locks and making one or two fantastic dance-steps as she spoke—­“The great Archbishop of this wonderful city of Rouen!  I want to ask him how it happened that God made men.  It was a mistake which He must be sorry for!  The Archbishop knows everything;—­he will tell me about it.  Ah!—­what a beautiful mistake is the Archbishop himself!—­and how soon women find it out!  Bon jour, Martine!”

“Bon jour, Marguerite!” responded Martine quietly.

Singing to herself, the crazed girl sauntered off.  Several of the market women looked after her.

“She killed her child, they say,” muttered the old vegetable-seller--"But no one knows—­”

“Sh—­sh—­sh!” hissed Martine angrily—­“What one does not know one should not say.  Mayhap there never was a child at all.  Whatever the wrong was, she has suffered for it;—­and if the man who led her astray ever comes nigh her, his life is not worth a centime.”

“Rough justice!” said one of the market porters, who had just paused close by to light his pipe.

“Aye, rough justice!” echoed Martine—­“When justice is not given to the people, the people take it for themselves!  And if a man deals ill by a woman, he has murdered her as surely as if he had put a knife through her;—­and ’tis but even payment when he gets the knife into himself.  Things in this life are too easy for men and too hard for women; men make the laws for their own convenience, and never a thought of us at all in the making.  They are a selfish lot!”