"What a supper we will have!" she cried to the charcoal-burner's children, who were turning somersaults in the dock leaves, while the swans stared and hissed.
When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have a flavor of Paradise still, especially when they are tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the year.
An old man called to her as she went by his door. All these little cabins lie close together, with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or their hedges of thorn between them; you may ride by and never notice them if you 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 Bébée'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. Mère 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, Bébée."
Bébée 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."