“Tell me well how she looks,” she said, “so that if I find this flagrant girl I may not mistake her,” and I saw her blench as I named the points of the Ward’s beauty. She jerked and quivered. Little sentences escaped from her like phrases of a delirium, of the utterance of which I think she was unconscious. “Little fair hands,” she said, “a trivial heart ... hair of two colors ... a snare, a snare ... a crumpled lip goes with a false tongue ...” Her jealousy kept pace. “Kill her, would they?... Let them ... does he think to keep her who could not keep her word? Does he lie safely with this false Ward while his people wait for him at——” “Stop!” I said. “I have told you all that concerns you personally, as one woman to another. But I advise you, I am on the side of the Outliers, if you say anything of value to them I shall not keep it.” She bit her lip. “What do I know of what the people do in my absence, or where they foregather? It is of him I think; does he imagine me waiting in my house like a faithful wife——” She threw out her arms, rocking on her knees. ... “Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!...” I do not know whether she uttered these words in the delirium of her jealousy, or if something in the anguished gesture sent the refrain of Ravenutzi’s song sounding through and through me. I heard it shaken like an organ somewhere above the sound of tears. ... “Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!...” She stood up as well as she could under the bent pine, to draw her dress into order, and asked me who had gone on the trail of Ravenutzi. I named all the men, and then Herman. “He too!” She looked at me with curious mocking. “All the men are mad, I think. Now I have a mind to go and see what this girl is like who sets all people by the ears, and when I have found her I shall come to tell you.” She smiled sidewise whimsically as she stooped to the chaparral again. Though there was inordinate hate in her look and insuperable hardness, there was that in her fierce, tormented spirit so laid hold on me that I neither put out my hand nor raised my voice to stay her as she went. XI HOW THE OUTLIERS CAME UP WITH THE FAR-FOLK AT A PLACE CALLED THE SMITHY, AND HERMAN CAME BACK TO RIVER WARD Nothing in all that struggle initiated by the lifting of the King’s Desire, pleased me so much as the way the Far-Folk outstretched themselves by their own cunning. They had chewed the cud of the old grudge so long, disgorging and regorging, that life smacked no other savour for them. They made the mistake of imagining no other among their enemies. That slow treachery of Ravenutzi’s, while it burned against the honor of the Outliers, kept the habit of treacherous thinking alive among their enemies. The Far-Folk wasted themselves upon the method and left not much to reckon with beyond the fact of possession.