and cried out, "Joan, wake!
Wake, there is no moment to lose! Come and plead for the fairies--come
and save them; only you can do it!"

But her mind was wandering, she did not know what we said nor what we
meant; so we went away knowing all was lost. Yes, all was lost, forever
lost; the faithful friends of the children for five hundred years must
go, and never come back any more.

It was a bitter day for us, that day that Pere Fronte held the function
under the tree and banished the fairies. We could not wear mourning that
any could have noticed, it would not have been allowed; so we had to be
content with some poor small rag of black tied upon our garments where it
made no show; but in our hearts we wore mourning, big and noble and
occupying all the room, for our hearts were ours; they could not get at
them to prevent that.

The great tree--l'Arbre Fee do Bourlemont was its beautiful name--was
never afterward quite as much to us as it had been before, but it was
always dear; is dear to me yet when I got there now, once a year in my
old age, to sit under it and bring back the lost playmates of my youth
and group them about me and look upon their faces through my tears and
break my heart, oh, my God! No, the place was not quite the same
afterward. In one or two ways it could not be; for, the fairies'
protection being gone, the spring lost much of its freshness and
coldness, and more than two-thirds of its volume, and the banished
serpents and stinging insects returned, and multiplied, and became a
torment and have remained so to this day.

When that wise little child, Joan, got well, we realized how much her
illness had cost us; for we found that we had been right in believing she
could save the fairies. She burst into a great storm of anger, for so
little a creature, and went straight to Pere Fronte, and stood up before
him where he sat, and made reverence and said:

"The fairies were to go if they showed themselves to people again, is it
not so?"

"Yes, that was it, dear."

"If a man comes prying into a person's room at midnight when that person
is half-naked, will you be so unjust as to say that that person is
showing himself to that man?"

"Well--no." The good priest looked a little troubled and uneasy when he
said it.

"Is a sin a sin, anyway, even if one did not intend to commit it?"

Pere Fronte threw up his hands and cried out:

"Oh, my poor little child, I see all my fault," and he drew here to hi