ou do not look for them under the leaves closely, as you would for
thrushes' nests.

He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine's; he
had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never
travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza
and the corn.

"Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he whispered, with an air of
mystery that made Bebee's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come in; I have
something for you. They were my dead daughter's--you have heard me talk
of her--Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they say; for me I
think it was yesterday. Mere Krebs--she is a hard woman--heard me talking
of my girl. She burst out laughing, 'Lord's sake, fool, why, your girl
would be sixty now an she had lived.' Well, so it may be; you see, the
new mill was put up the week she died, and you call the new mill old;
but, my girl, she is young to me. Always young. Come here, Bebee."

Bebee went after him a little awed, into the dusky interior, that smelt
of stored apples and of dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was a
walnut-wood press, such as the peasants of France and the low countries
keep their homespun linen in and their old lace that serves for the
nuptials and baptisms of half a score of generations.

The old man unlocked it with a trembling hand, and there came from it an
odor of dead lavender and of withered rose leaves.

On the shelves there were a girl's set of clothes, and a girl's sabots,
and a girl's communion veil and wreath.

"They are all hers," he whispered,--"all hers. And sometimes in the
evening time I see her coming along the lane for them--do you not know?
There is nothing changed; nothing changed; the grass, and the trees, and
the huts, and the pond are all here; why should she only be gone away?"

"Antoine is gone."

"Yes. But he was old; my girl is young."

He stood a moment, with the press door open, a perplexed trouble in his
dim eyes; the divine faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of
ignorance made him cling to this one thought without power of judgment in
it.

"They say she would be sixty," he said, with a little dreary smile. "But
that is absurd, you know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she would
run--no lapwing could fly faster over corn. These are her things, you
see; yes--all of them. That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her
belt the day before the wagon knocked her down and killed her. I have