edge of the copse the little hill fell away into an
open, sunny meadow, fragrant with wild-flowers and clover, through which a
rivulet ran deep and cold between grassy banks.

It supplied the drinking water of Sainte Lesse; and a branch of it poured
bubbling into the stone-rimmed _lavoir_ where generations of Sainte Lesse
maids had scrubbed the linen of the community, kneeling there amid wild
flowers and fluttering butterflies in the shade of three tall elms.

There was nobody at the pool; Maryette saw that as she came out of the
hazel copse through the meadow. And very soon she was on her knees at the
clear pool's edge, bare of arm and throat and bosom, her blue wool skirts
trussed up, and elbow deep in snowy suds.

Overhead the sky was a quivering, royal blue; the earth shimmered in its
bath of sunshine; the west wind blowing carried away eastward the
reverberations of the distant cannonade, so that not even the vibration of
the concussions disturbed Sainte Lesse.

A bullfinch was piping lustily in a young tree as she began her task; a
blackbird answered from somewhere among the hawthorns with a bewildering
series of complicated trills.

As the little mistress-of-the-bells scrubbed and beat the clothes with her
paddle, and rinsed and wrung them and soaped them afresh, she sang softly
under her breath, to an ancient air of her _pays_, words that she
improvised to fit it--_vrai chanson de laveuse_:

"A blackbird whistles
I love!
Over the thistles
Butterflies hover,
Each with her lover
In love.
Blue Demoiselles that glisten,
Listen, I love!
Wind of the west, oh, listen,
I am in love!
Sing my song, ye little gold bees!
Opal bubbles around my knees
All afloat in the soap-sud broth,
Whisper it low to the snowy froth;
And Thou who rulest the skies above,
Mary, adored--I love--I love!"

Slap-slap! went her paddle; the sud-spume flew like shreds of cotton;
iridescent foam set with bubbles swirled in the stone-edged basin,
constantly swept away down stream by the current, constantly renewed as
she soaped and scrubbed, kneeling there in the meadow grass above the
pool.

The blackbird came quite near to watch her; the bullfinch, attracted by
her childish voice as she sang the song she was making, whistled bold
response, silent only when the echoing slap of the paddle startled him
where he sat on the trembling tip of an aspen.

Blue dragon f