the same person who was cooking now down there bent over the hearth, and I thought of the fairies at the Funambules and the shrivelled masks that concealed soft bright faces of youth until the last scene when they were cast aside and the Temple of Love gleamed beneath the magical rays of a revolving sun.

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, ‘how pretty she was!’

‘And what about me?’ said Sylvie, who had finally succeeded in opening the famous drawer. From it she drew a long dress of worn taffeta that crackled when she shook out the wrinkles.

‘I must try it on to see if it suits me. Oh! I’m going to look like an old-fashioned fairy!’

‘The Fairy of Legend, for ever young!’ I thought to myself; and Sylvie unhooked her printed-cotton frock, letting it fall around her feet. The taffeta dress fitted her slim waist perfectly, and she told me to hook her up.

‘Oh, these wide sleeves, aren’t they absurd!’ she cried; but their loop-shaped openings revealed her pretty bare arms, and her little white throat rose gracefully out of the faded tulle and ribbons of the bodice.

‘Do finish it! Don’t you know how to hook up a dress?’ She reminded me of Greuze’s ‘Village Bride’.

‘You must have some powder,’ I said.

‘We’ll find some,’ and she began to rummage again in the drawers. And the treasures they contained! What delicious perfume! What a glistening of tinsel and brilliant colours: two slightly broken mother-of- pearl fans, some Chinese paste boxes, an amber necklace, and a host of other trinkets from which Sylvie extracted two little white slippers with paste buckles.

‘Oh, I must wear these,’ she said, ‘and there ought to be embroidered stockings to go with them.’ A moment afterwards we unrolled a pair of silk ones—delicate pink with green clocks; but the old woman’s voice and the rattling of the frying-pan below put an end to our explorations.

‘Go on down,’ Sylvie commanded, and nothing I could say would persuade her to allow me to help with the stockings and slippers, so I went down to find the contents of the frying-pan already dished up—a rasher of bacon with fried eggs. But I soon had to mount the stairs again at Sylvie’s call, and found her costume now complete.

‘Dress yourself quickly,’ and she pointed to the gamekeeper’s wedding-suit spread out on the chest. In a few moments I had become the bridegroom of a past generation. Sylvie was waiting for me on the stairs, and we descended hand-in-hand to meet the astonished gaze and the startled cry of the old woman:

‘Oh, my children!’ She wept first and then smiled through her tears. It was a vision of her youth, at once cruel and delightful. We sat gravely down beside her, but our gaiety soon returned when she began to recall the pompous festivities of her wedding. She even remembered the old part-songs that had been sung around her bridal table, and the simple epithalamium that had accompanied her return, upon her husband’s arm, after the dance. We repeated these, mindful of every hiatus and assonance; Solomon’s Ecclesiastes was not more full of colour nor more amorous. And we were husband and wife for that whole lovely summer’s morning.

VII. Chaâlis

It is four o’clock in the morning; the road sinks down into a cut, and then rises again. The carriage will soon pass Orry, then La Chapelle. To the left there is a road that skirts the Forest of Hallate, where I went one evening with Sylvie’s brother in his cart; I think it was to some sort of festival on Saint Bartholomew’s day. His pony flew over the little-used woodland roads as if bound for a witches’ sabbath, until we turned