her and descended the hill and the street just as the twilight closed
in and the little lights began to glimmer through the lattices and the
shutters and the green mantle of the boughs, while the red fires of the
smithy forge glowed brightly in the gloom, and a white horse waited to
be shod, a boy in a blue blouse seated on its back and switching away
with a branch of budding hazel the first gray gnats of the early year.

"It is well done, it is well done," she said to herself, looking at the
low rosy clouds and the pale gold of the waning sky. "A year or two, and
I shall be in my grave. I shall leave him 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.