But poverty had not been the only reason for Grand-père’s bitterness. Even when he sat to watch her and Marie-Jeanne, his hands folded on his stick, quiet and at peace in the evening air as it might have seemed, she was aware of the bitterness brooding there, unappeased, at the bottom of the deep, considering look bent upon them. There had been no time to think about it while she played with Marie-Jeanne. Marie-Jeanne was the blacksmith’s daughter and there had been many happy days with her at Montarel. Marie-Jeanne had black eyes and her pig-tails were tied together with red tape and plaited so tightly that they surrounded her shrewd little face with a wiry circle. They brought up a family of dolls in a corner of the _jardin potager_; Alix was the father, for she had never cared fosteringly for dolls, and Marie-Jeanne the mother. They whipped their tops in the courtyard where the tall blue lilies stood in the damp about the well. The Renaissance wrought-iron windlass was all rusted and broken; and the lilies had thrust their cord-like roots through the cracked earthenware of their great pots. Looking out of the door in the courtyard, one might see the cheerful _matelassière_ sitting in the shade of the enormous horse-chestnut-tree on the wayside grass. The heaped wool seemed to curdle and foam about her like a turbulent yet cosy sea. She combed it out on her loom and smiled and nodded at Alix. “_Bonjour, la jolie petite demoiselle_,” she would say. Mélanie grumbled at the _matelassière_ and said she was a thief; but she gave Alix a bowl of _café au lait_ to carry out to her when she remade their mattresses, and Alix felt a pleasing sense of complicity in lawlessness when the _matelassière_, bending her lips to the steaming coffee, would close one eye at her in a long wink. She seemed a very happy person.