Not that night could I make out all the story, though it was not difficult to define its essential tragedy, and later on a gossip in the neighborhood and a headstone in the churchyard told me the rest.  The unquiet young soul that had sung so wistfully to and fro the orchard was my landlord’s daughter.  She was the only child of her parents, a beautiful, willful girl, exotically unlike those from whom she was sprung and among whom she lived with a disdainful air of exile.  She was, as a child, a little creature of fairy fancies, and as she grew up it was plain to her father and mother that she had come from another world than theirs.  To them she seemed like a child in an old fairy-tale strangely found on his hearth by some shepherd as he returns from the fields at evening—­a little fairy girl swaddled in fine linen, and dowered with a mysterious bag of gold.

Soon she developed delicate spiritual needs to which her simple parents were strangers.  From long truancies in the woods she would come home laden with mysterious flowers, and soon she came to ask for books and pictures and music, of which the poor souls that had given her birth had never heard.  Finally she had her way, and went to study at a certain fashionable college; and there the brief romance of her life began.  There she met a romantic young Frenchman who had read Ronsard to her and written her those picturesque letters I had found in the old mahogany work-box.  And after a while the young Frenchman had gone back to France, and the letters had ceased.  Month by month went by, and at length one day, as she sat wistful at the window, looking out at the foolish sunlit road, a message came.  He was dead.  That headstone in the village churchyard tells the rest.  She was very young to die—­scarcely nineteen years; and the dead who have died young, with all their hopes and dreams still like unfolded buds within their hearts, do not rest so quietly in the grave as those who have gone through the long day from morning until evening and are only too glad to sleep.

* * * * *

Next day I took the little box to a quiet corner of the orchard, and made a little pyre of fragrant boughs—­for so I interpreted the wish of that young, unquiet spirit—­and the beautiful words are now safe, taken up again into the aerial spaces from which they came.

But since then the birds sing no more little French songs in my old orchard.

The Bowmen

BY ARTHUR MACHEN

     From The Bowmen, by Arthur Machen.  Published in England by
     Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., and in America by
     G.P.  Putnam’s Sons.  By permission of the publishers and Arthur
     Machen.

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit.  But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.