gardens and stately pleasure grounds, but
the chipped worn figure of a lady, lying with folded hands and a quaint
head-dress and straight falling hair. No one quite knew where that
statue came from, except that it must have lain once upon a tomb in
some church or monastery chapel, and in evil days, when men had
forgotten their reverence for holy ground and the quiet dead, the tomb
must have been destroyed, and the figure defaced and thrown out as
rubbish. Then some one later on had brought her to the cottage and set
her up as an ornament to the garden, leaning against a tree, and
looking very strange and uncomfortable. When Betty and her sister were
little children they were half afraid of the tall grim figure, which
looked queer and uncanny among the bushes in the twilight, but as they
grew older and knew more about her, they lost their fear of her and
began to be sorry for her, and they got Peter and some of the village
boys to move her out of her unnatural position and lay her down on the
grass as she had once lain on her tomb in the church, and planted
flowers beside her. And the great purple convolvulus, or, as I love to
call it by its sweet old name, the Morning Glory, seeded itself every
year, and twined its soft tendrils and opened its lovely flowers all
about the poor lady, as if it wanted to hide all the marks of hard
usage, and the grass made her a soft pillow, and the pink rose petals
dropped all about her, and she looked as if she were happily asleep
among the flowers. And when she was being moved the boys came upon
some other pieces of stone among the bushes, which might have been part
of the same tomb. There was one bit with part of a coat-of-arms on it
which no one could make out, and another bit with some letters, many of
them quite defaced, but after a lot of puzzling and rubbing the moss
off, the little girls managed to read the two words, 'Demoiselle
Jehanne.' Miss Angelica felt sure it was French, and she copied it out
and took it back to school to ask her schoolmistress what it meant.
And the mistress said she was right, it was most likely old
Norman-French such as was talked in England five or six hundred years
ago, and that 'demoiselle' was the title of a young lady, and 'Jehanne'
was the old way of writing Jeanne or Jane. So Angelica and Betty
decided directly that it must be the name of their stone lady, and
called her 'Demoiselle Jehanne,' or, to make it clearer to Peter and
their other