How quickly a train of thought can flash through the brain!  Saintou asked himself if he loved the girl or the hair, and his heart answered very sincerely that the hair, divine as it was, had been but the outward sign which led him to love the inward grace of the girl.

’Mademoiselle ought not to have said “no”; I should have come very willingly and would have cut her hair, if I had known it must be so.’

’I made my sister cut it, but it’s frightful.  It looks as if one had tried to mow a lawn with a pair of scissors, or shear a sheep with a penknife.’

‘I will make all that right,’ said Saintou soothingly; ’I will make it all right.  Just in a moment I will make it very nice.’

Yes, it was too true, the hair was gone; and very barbarously it had been handled.  ‘I shall make it all right,’ he said cheerfully; ’I shall trim it beautifully for mademoiselle.  Ah, the beautiful colour is there all the same.’

‘As red as a sunset or a geranium,’ she said.

‘You do not believe that,’ sighed Saintou.  He trimmed the hair very tenderly, and curled it softly round the white face, till it looked like a great fair marigold just beginning to curl in its petals for the night.  He worked slowly, for he had something he wanted to say, and when his work was done he summoned up courage and said it.  He told her his hopes and fears.  He told her the story blunderingly enough, but it had its effect.

‘Mon Dieu!’ said Saintou, but he said it in a tone that made his sister, who was listening to every word through the door, leave that occupation and dart in to his assistance.

‘Qu’elle est morte,’ was her brief stern comment.  And so it was.  The baker’s daughter had felt, and she had died.

‘This is not wholly unexpected,’ said the baker sadly, when he came to carry away the corpse of his daughter.  ‘We all expected it,’ said the neighbours; ‘she had heart disease.’  And they talked their fill, and never discovered the truth it would have pleased them best to talk about.

The short hair curled softly about the face of the dead girl as she lay in her coffin, and Saintou paid heavily for masses for her sweet soul.  When they had laid her in the churchyard he came home, and took the key, and went into the little parlour all alone.  She had never seen it.  She had never even heard of it.  It is sad to bury a baby that is dead; it is sadder, if we but knew it, to bury in darkness and silence a child that has never lived.  A joy that has gone from us for ever is a jewel that trembles like a tear on Sorrow’s breast, but the brightest stars in her diadem are the memories of hopes that have passed away unrealised and untold.  Ah well, perhaps the gay trappings of the little room, by their daily influence on his life, drew him nearer to heaven.  He gave the key to his sister afterwards, and they used the room as their own; but that day he locked himself in alone, and, hiding his face in the cushions of her chair, he wept as only a strong man can weep.