“What do you do here?” I inquired.

Her little heart palpitated in the answer—­“Oh, guard the geese.”

“Do they give you trouble?”

“Not much, except that wicked gander.”  She pointed out with her knitting-needle a sleek white fellow, who flirted his tail and turned an eye, quavering as if he said—­“La, la, la!”

“What does he do?”

“He would be at the vines and the corn, monsieur.”

“Bad gander!”

“I switch him,” she informed me, like a magistrate.

“But that would only make him run.”

“Also I have a string in my pocket, and I tie him by the leg to a tree.”

“Serves him right.  Is the Marquis du Plessy at the chateau?”

Her face grew shaded, as a cloud chases sunlight before it across a meadow.  “Do you mean the new marquis, the old marquis’ cousin, monsieur?  He went away directly after the burial.”

“What burial?"’

“The old marquis’ burial.  That was before St. John’s day.”

“Be careful what you say, my child!”

“Didn’t you know he was dead, monsieur?”

“I have been on a journey.  Was his death sudden?”

“He was killed in a duel in Paris.”

I sat down on the grass with my head in my hands.  Bellenger had told the truth.

One scant month the Marquis du Plessy fostered me like a son.  To this hour my slow heart aches for the companionship of the lightest, most delicate spirit I ever encountered in man.

Once I lifted my head and insisted,

“It can’t be true!”

“Monsieur,” the goose girl asserted solemnly, “it is true.  The blessed St. Alpin, my patron, forget me if I tell you a lie.”

Around the shadowed spot where I sat I heard trees whispering on the hills, and a cart rumbling along the hardened dust of the road.

“Monsieur,” spoke the goose girl out of her good heart, “if you want to go to his chapel I will show you the path.”

She tied a string around the leg of the wicked gander and attached him to the tree, shaking a wand at him in warning.  He nipped her sleeve, and hissed, and hopped, his wives remonstrating softly; but his guardian left him bound and carried her knitting down a valley to a stream, across the bridge, and near an opening in the bushes at the foot of a hill.

“Go all to the right, monsieur,” she said, “and you will come to the chapel where the Du Plessys are buried.”

I gave her the largest coin in my pocket, and she flew back as well as the spirit of childhood could fly in wooden shoes.  All the geese, formed in a line, waddled to meet her, perhaps bearing a memorial of wrongs from their husband.

The climb was steep, rounding a darkened ferny shoulder of lush forest, yet promising more and more a top of sunlight.  At the summit was a carriage road which ascended by some easier plane.  Keeping all to the right as the goose girl directed, I found a chapel like a shrine.