andkerchief or coin that
vanished under their very noses at the magic snap of his finger.

Old men gossiped willingly with him; women liked him and their rare smiles
in the war-sobered town of Sainte Lesse were often for him as he sauntered
along the quiet street, clanking, swaggering, affable, ready for
conversation with anybody, and always ready for the small, confident hands
that unceremoniously clasped his when he passed by where children played.

As for Maryette Courtray, called Carillonnette, she mounted the bell-tower
once every hour, from six in the morning until nine o'clock in the
evening, to play the passing of Time toward that eternity into which it is
always and ceaselessly moving.

After nine o'clock Carillonnette set the drum and wound it; and through
the dark hours of the night the bells played mechanically every hour for a
few moments before Bayard struck.

Between these duties the girl managed the old inn, to which, since the
war, nobody came any more--and with these occupations her life was
full--sufficiently full, perhaps, without the advent of John Burley.

They met with enough frequency for her, if not for him. Their encounters
took place between her duties aloft at the keyboard under the successive
tiers of bells and his intervals of prowling among his mules.

Sometimes he found her sewing in the parlour--she could have gone to her
own room, of course; sometimes he encountered her in the corridor, in the
street, in the walled garden behind the inn, where with basket and pan she
gathered vegetables in season.

There was a stone seat out there, built against the southern wall, and in
the shadowed coolness of it she sometimes shelled peas.

During such an hour of liberty from the bell-tower he found the dark-eyed
little mistress of the bells sorting various vegetables and singing under
her breath to herself the carillon music of Josef Denyn.

"Tray chick, mademoiselle," he said, with a cheerful self-assertion, to
hide the embarrassment which always assailed him when he encountered her.

"You know, Monsieur Burley, you should not say '_tres chic_' to me," she
said, shaking her pretty head. "It sounds a little familiar and a little
common."

"Oh," he exclaimed, very red. "I thought it was the thing to say."

She smiled, continuing to shell the peas, then, with her sensitive and
slightly flushed face still lowered, she looked at him out of her dark
blue eyes.

"Sometimes," she said, "young