The great tree—­l’Arbre Fee do Bourlemont was its beautiful name—­was never afterward quite as much to us as it had been before, but it was always dear; is dear to me yet when I got there now, once a year in my old age, to sit under it and bring back the lost playmates of my youth and group them about me and look upon their faces through my tears and break my heart, oh, my God!  No, the place was not quite the same afterward.  In one or two ways it could not be; for, the fairies’ protection being gone, the spring lost much of its freshness and coldness, and more than two-thirds of its volume, and the banished serpents and stinging insects returned, and multiplied, and became a torment and have remained so to this day.

When that wise little child, Joan, got well, we realized how much her illness had cost us; for we found that we had been right in believing she could save the fairies.  She burst into a great storm of anger, for so little a creature, and went straight to Pere Fronte, and stood up before him where he sat, and made reverence and said: 

“The fairies were to go if they showed themselves to people again, is it not so?”

“Yes, that was it, dear.”

“If a man comes prying into a person’s room at midnight when that person is half-naked, will you be so unjust as to say that that person is showing himself to that man?”

“Well—­no.”  The good priest looked a little troubled and uneasy when he said it.

“Is a sin a sin, anyway, even if one did not intend to commit it?”

Pere Fronte threw up his hands and cried out: 

“Oh, my poor little child, I see all my fault,” and he drew here to his side and put an arm around her and tried to make his peace with her, but her temper was up so high that she could not get it down right away, but buried her head against his breast and broke out crying and said: 

“Then the fairies committed no sin, for there was no intention to commit one, they not knowing that any one was by; and because they were little creatures and could not speak for themselves and say the saw was against the intention, not against the innocent act, because they had no friend to think that simple thing for them and say it, they have been sent away from their home forever, and it was wrong, wrong to do it!”

The good father hugged her yet closer to his side and said: 

“Oh, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the heedless and unthinking are condemned; would God I could bring the little creatures back, for your sake.  And mine, yes, and mine; for I have been unjust.  There, there, don’t cry—­nobody could be sorrier than your poor old friend—­don’t cry, dear.”

“But I can’t stop right away, I’ve got to.  And it is no little matter, this thing that you have done.  Is being sorry penance enough for such an act?”

Pere Fronte turned away his face, for it would have hurt her to see him laugh, and said: