The girl crouched deeper into her clothes, until those unwinking eyes
relieved her by turning with indifference toward the chimney.

"I have no pity for any Marguerite," Le Rossignol added, and she tossed
from her head the entire subject with a cap made of white gull breasts.
A brush of red hair stood up in thousands of tendrils, exaggerating by
its nimbus the size of her upper person. Never had dwarf a sweeter
voice. If she had been compressed in order to produce melody, her tones
were compensation, enough. She made lilting sounds while dangling her
feet to the blaze, as if she thought in music.

Le Rossignol was so positive a force that she seldom found herself
overborne by the presence of large human beings. The only man in the
fortress who saw her without superstition was Klussman. He inclined to
complain of her antics, but not to find magic in her flights and
returns. At that period deformity was the symbol of witchcraft. Blame
fell upon this dwarf when toothache or rheumatic pains invaded the
barracks, especially if the sufferer had spoken against her unseen
excursions with her swan. Protected from childhood by the family of La
Tour, she had grown an autocrat, and bent to nobody except her lady.

"Where is my clavier?" exclaimed Le Rossignol. "I heard a tune in the
woods which I must get out of my clavier,--a green tune, the color of
quickening lichens; a dropping tune with sap in it; a tune like the wind
across inland lakes."

She ran along the settle, and thrust her head around its high back.

Zélie, with white garments upon one arm, was setting solidly forth down