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, far away to the clouds and the
river.

At night, when the guests had departed and all was quite still within
and without, Reine Allix sat alone at her window in the roof, thinking
of their future and of her past, and watching the stars come out, one by
another, above the woods. From her lattice in the eaves she saw straight