A shrill laugh finished this outburst, but Martine knew who it was
that spoke, and maintained her equanimity.

"Is that you again, Marguerite?" she said, not unkindly--"You will
tire yourself to death wandering about the streets all day."

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!"