Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/256

 of famine and flame, was the happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau.

"I am old: yes, I am very old," she would say, looking up from her spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun, "very old—ninety two last summer. But when one has a roof over one's head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like mine, and when one has lived all one's life in the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be so old. Ah, yes, my little ones—yes, though you doubt it, you little birds that have just tried your wings—it is well to be so old. One has time to think, and thank the good God, which one never seemed to have a minute to do in that work, work, work, when one was young."

Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very withered, and very bent, and very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light in them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had bronzed it with its harvest suns and blown on it with its winter winds.

She wore always the same garb of homely dark blue serge, always the same tall white headgear, always the same pure silver ear-rings, that had been at once an heirloom and a nuptial gift. She was always shod in her wooden sabots, and she always walked abroad with her staff of ash.