“Very barbarously dressed!” observed Diane de Christeuil, showing her white teeth.

This remark was a flash of light to the others. It showed them where to direct their attack on the gipsy. There being no vulnerable spot in her beauty, they threw themselves upon her dress.

“That is very true,” said La Montmichel. “Pray, how comest thou to be running thus barenecked about the streets, without either gorget or kerchief?”

“And a petticoat so short as to fill one with alarm,” added La Gaillefontaine.

“My girl,” continued Fleur-de-Lys spitefully, “thou wilt certainly be fined for that gold belt.”

“My poor girl,” said Diane, with a cruel smile, “if thou hadst the decency to wear sleeves on thy arms, they would not be so burned by the sun.”

It was a sight worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Phœbus, to watch how these high-born maidens darted their envenomed tongues, and coiled and glided and wound serpent-like about the hapless dancing girl. Smiling and cruel, they pitilessly searched and appraised all her poor artless finery of spangles and tinsel. Then followed the heartless laugh, the cutting irony, humiliations without end. Sarcasm, supercilious praise, and spiteful glances descended on the gipsy girl from every side. One might have judged them to be those high-born Roman ladies who amused themselves by thrusting golden pins into the bosom of a beautiful slave, or graceful greyhounds circling with distended nostrils and flaming eyes round some poor hind of the forest, and only prevented by their master’s eye from devouring it piecemeal. And what was she after all to these high-born damsels but a miserable dancing girl of the streets? They seemed to ignore the fact of her presence altogether, and spoke of her to her face as of something degraded and unclean, though diverting enough to make jest of.

The Egyptian was not insensible to these petty stings. From time to time a blush of shame burned in her cheek, a flash of anger in her eyes; a disdainful retort seemed to tremble on her lips, and she made the little contemptuous pout with which the reader is familiar. But she remained silent, motionless, her eyes fixed on Phœbus with a look of resignation infinitely sweet and sad. In this gaze there mingled, too, both joy and tenderness; she seemed to restrain herself for fear of being driven away.

As for Phœbus, he laughed and took the gipsy’s part with a mixture of impertinence and pity.

“Let them talk, child!” he said, jingling his gold spurs. “Doubtless your costume is somewhat strange and extravagant; but when a girl is so charming as you, what does it matter?”

“Mon Dieu!” cried La Gaillefontaine, drawing up her swan-like neck, with a bitter smile. “It is evident that Messieurs the King’s archers take fire easily at the bright gipsy eyes.”

“Why not?” said Phœbus.

At this rejoinder, uttered carelessly by the captain, as one throws a stone at random without troubling to see where it falls, Colombe began to laugh and Amolette and Diane and Fleur-de-Lys, though a tear rose at the same time to the eye of the latter.

The gipsy girl, who had dropped her eyes as Colombe and La Gaillefontaine spoke, raised them now all radiant with joy and pride and fixed them again on Phœbus. At that moment she was dazzlingly beautiful.

The elder lady, while she observed the scene, felt vaguely incensed without knowing exactly why.

“Holy Virgin!” she suddenly exclaimed, “what is this rubbing against my legs? Ah, the horrid beast!”