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."

"Yes. But he was old; my girl is young."

He stood a moment, with the press door open, a perplexed trouble in his