WHEN night fell, her grandmother took the basket in which Fanchon had brought her a cake, filled it with apples and grapes, hung it on the child’s arm, and said: “Now, Fanchon, go straight back home, without stopping to play with the village ragamuffins. Be a good girl always. Goodbye.”
Then she kissed her. But Fanchon stood thinking at the door.
“Grandmother?” she said. “What is it, little Fanchon?” “I should like to know,” said Fanchon, “if there are any beautiful Princes among the birds that ate up my bread.”
“Now that there are no more fairies,” her grandmother told her, “the birds are all birds and nothing else.”
“Good-bye, grandmother.”
“Good-bye, Fanchon.”
And Fanchon set off across the meadows for her home, the chimneys of which she could see smoking a long way off against the red sky of sunset.
On the road she met Antoine, the gardener’s little boy. He asked her: