far away to the clouds and the
river.

At night, when the guests had departed and all was quite still within
and without, Reine Allix sat alone at her window in the roof, thinking
of their future and of her past, and watching the stars come out, one by
another, above the woods. From her lattice in the eaves she saw straight
up the village street; saw the dwellings of her lifelong neighbours,
the slopes of the rich fields, the gleam of the broad gray water,
the whiteness of the crucifix against the darkened skies. She saw it
all--all so familiar, with that intimate association only possible to
the peasant who has dwelt on one spot from birth to age. In that faint
light, in those deep shadows, she could trace all the scene as though
the brightness of the moon shone on it; it was all, in its homeliness
and simplicity, intensely dear to her. In the playtime of her childhood,
in the courtship of her youth, in the joys and woes of her wifehood and
widowhood, the bitter pains and sweet ecstasies of her maternity, the
hunger and privation of struggling desolate years, the contentment
and serenity of old age--in all these her eyes had rested only on this
small, quaint, leafy street, with its dwellings close and low, like
bee-hives in a garden, and its pasture-lands and corn-lands, wood-girt
and water-fed, stretching as far as the sight could reach. Every inch of
its soil, every turn of its paths, was hallowed to her with innumerable
memories; all her beloved dead were garnered there where the white
Christ watched them; when her time should come, she thought, she would
rest with them nothing loath. As she looked, the tears of thanksgiving
rolled down her withered cheeks, and she bent her feeble limbs and knelt
down in the moonlight, praising God that He had given her to live and
die in this cherished home, and beseeching Him for her children that
they likewise might dwell in honesty, and with length of days abide
beneath that roof.

"God is good," she murmured, as she stretched herself to sleep beneath
the eaves,--"God is good. Maybe, when He takes me to Himself, if I be
worthy, He will tell His holy saints to give me a little corner in His
kingdom, that He shall fashion for me in the likeness of the Berceau."
For it seemed to her that, than the Berceau, heaven itself could hold no
sweeter or fairer nook of Paradise.

The year rolled on, and the cottage under the sycamores was but the
happier for its new inmate. Bernadou was