im easier if I know he has some
creature to care for him, and I shall be quiet in my coffin, knowing
that his children's children will live on and on and on in the Berceau,
and sometimes perhaps think a little of me when the nights are long and
they sit round the fire."

She went in out of the dewy air, into the little low, square room of her
cottage, and went up to Bernadou and laid her hands on his shoulders.

"Be it well with thee, my grandson, and with thy sons' sons after thee,"
she said solemnly. "Margot will be thy wife. May thy days and hers be
long in thy birthplace!"

A month later they were married. It was then May. The green nest of the
Berceau seemed to overflow with the singing of birds and the blossoming
of flowers. The corn-lands promised a rare harvest, and the apple
orchards were weighed down with their red and white blossoms. The little
brown streams in the woods brimmed over in the grass, and the air was
full of sweet mellow sunlight, a cool fragrant breeze, a continual music
of humming bees and soaring larks and mule-bells ringing on the roads,
and childish laughter echoing from the fields.

In this glad springtime Bernadou and Margot were wedded, going with
their friends one sunny morning up the winding hill-path to the little
gray chapel whose walls were hidden in ivy, and whose sorrowful Christ
looked down through the open porch across the blue and hazy width of
the river. Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody at all
the village dances, played before them tunefully; little children, with
their hands full of wood-flowers, ran before them; his old blind poodle
smelt its way faithfully by their footsteps; their priest led the way
upward with the cross held erect against the light; Reine Allix walked
beside them, nearly as firmly as she had trodden the same road seventy
years before in her own bridal hour. In the hollow below lay the Berceau
de Dieu, with its red gables and its thatched roofs hidden beneath
leaves, and its peaceful pastures smiling under the serene blue skies of
France.

They were happy--ah, heaven, so happy!--and all their little world
rejoiced with them.

They came home and their neighbours entered with them, and ate and
drank, and gave them good wishes and gay songs, and the old priest
blessed them with a father's tenderness upon their threshold; and the
fiddle of Georges sent gladdest dance-music flying through the open
casements, across the road, up the hill,