knocked at the window, a child for whom she had played and sung many
times. He stood there in his little red nightgown, and nodded and
laughed; and Marie nodded back, smiling, and wondered if he would ever
run away, and ever know how good, how good it was, to be alone, with no
one else in the world to say, "Do this!" or "Do that!" Just as she
came out, the sun rose over the hill, and looking at the fiery ball
Marie perceived that it danced in the sky. Yes, assuredly, so it was!
There was the same wavering motion that she had seen on every fair
Easter Day that she could remember. She thought how Mere Jeanne had
first called her attention, to it, when she was little, little, just
able to toddle, and had told her that the sun danced so on Easter
Morning, for joy that the Good Lord had risen from the dead; and so it
was a lesson for us all, and we must dance on Easter Day, if we never
danced all the rest of the year. Ah, how they danced at home there in
the village! But now, it was not Easter at all, and yet the sun
danced; what should it mean? And it came to Marie's mind that perhaps
the Good Lord had told it to dance, for a sign to her that all would go
well, and that she was doing quite right to run away from persons with
the evil eye. When you came to think of it, what was more probable?
They always said, those girls in the village, that the saints did the
things they asked them to do. When Barbe lost her gold earring, did
not Saint Joseph find it for her, and tell her to look among the
potato-parings that had been thrown out the day before? and there, sure
enough, it was, and the pigs never touching it, because they had been
told not to touch! Well, and if the saints could do that, it would be
a pity indeed if the Good Lord could not make the sun dance when he
felt like doing a kind thing for a poor girl.

With the dazzle of that dancing sun still in her eyes, with happy
thoughts filling her mind, Marie turned the corner of the straggling