o hot to be
pleasant. All these things happen between dawn and a late breakfast in
my garden.

Suzette sang all day. It is always so with Suzette upon the days when
the abandoned house is giving a dinner. The truth is, Suzette loves to
cook; her pride and her happiness increase as the hour appointed for my
guests to arrive approaches. With Suzette it is a delightful event.

The cracked jingle-bell over my stone gateway had jingled incessantly
since early morning, summoning this good little Norman maid-of-all-work
to slip her trim feet into her sabots and rush across the court to open
the small door piercing my wall beside the big gates. Twice for beggars,
once for the grocer's boy, three times for the baker--who had, after
all, forgotten the _brioche_; again for the baker's boy, who invariably
forgets if he thinks there is another chance in his forgetting, of
paying a forgotten compliment to Suzette. I heard his mother scolding
him yesterday. His bread, which he kneads and bakes himself before dawn,
is losing its lightness. There is little harmony between rising yeast
and a failing heart. Again the bell jingles; this time it is the Mere
Marianne, with a basket of quivering, iridescent mackerel just in from
the night's fishing.

Mere Marianne, who once was a village belle, is now thirty-three years
of age, strong as a man, fair-haired, hatless, bronzed by the sun,
salt-tanned, blue-eyed, a good mother to seven fair-haired, blue-eyed
children; yet a hard, amiable drinker in her leisure hours after a good
catch.

"_Bonjour_, my all beautiful!" she greets Suzette as the door opens.

"_Bonjour_, madame!" returns Suzette, her cheeks flushed from her
kitchen fire.

The word "madame" seems out of place, for Mere Marianne wears her man's
short tarpaulin coat cinched about her waist with a thin tarred rope.
Her sinewy legs, bare to the knees, are tightly incased in a pair of
sea-soaked trousers.

"So monsieur is having his friends to dinner," she rattles on
garrulously, swinging her basket to the ground and kneeling before it.
"I heard it as I came up the road from Blancheville's girl, who had it
from the Mere Taurville. _Eh ben!_ What do you think of these?" she adds
in the same breath, as she turns up two handsful of live mackerel. "Six
sous apiece to you, my pretty one. You see I came to you first; I'm
giving them to you as cheap as if you were my own daughter."

"Come, be quick," returns Suzette. "I have my lobster