It was hardly sun-up on the following morning when the three children—Trézinie, Cami and the little negress, La Fringante—were filling big, flat Indian baskets from the abundance of brilliant flowers that studded the hill.  
In their eagerness they had the slope and deep into the forest without thought of M’sieur Michel or of his . Suddenly, in the wood, they came upon his hut—low, forbidding, seeming to upon them for their intrusion.
 
La Fringante dropped her basket, and, with a cry, fled. Cami looked as if he wanted to 113do the same. But Trézinie, after the first , saw that the ogre himself was away. The wooden of the one window was closed. The door, so low that even a small man must have stooped to enter it, was secured with a chain. Absolute silence , except for the whirr of wings in the air, the fitful notes of a bird in the treetop.
 
“Can’t you see it’s nobody there!” cried Trézinie impatiently.
 
La Fringante, distracted between curiosity and terror, had crept cautiously back again. Then they all peeped through the wide chinks between the logs of which the cabin was built.
 
M’sieur Michel had evidently begun the construction of his house by felling a huge tree, whose remaining stood in the centre of the hut, and served him as a table. This table was worn smooth by twenty-five years of use. Upon it were such as the man required. Everything within the hovel, the sleeping , the one seat, were as rude as a would have fashioned them.
 
The Cami could have stayed for hours with his eyes fastened to the , 114seeking some dead, mute sign of that awful pastime with which he believed M’sieur Michel was accustomed to his . But Trézinie was wholly by the thought of her Easter offerings. She wanted flowers and flowers, fresh with the earth and crisp with dew.
 
When the three youngsters down the hill again there was not a purple verbena left about M’sieur Michel’s hut; not a May apple blossom, not a stalk of phlox—hardly a violet.
 
He was something of a savage, feeling that the solitude belonged to him. Of late there had been forming within his soul a sentiment toward man, keener than , bitter as hate. He was coming to even that brief with others into which his traffic forced him.
 
So when M’sieur Michel returned to his hut, and with his quick, accustomed eye saw that his woods had been , rage seized him. It was not that he loved the flowers that were gone more than he loved the stars, or the wind that trailed across the hill, but they belonged to and were a part of that life which he had 115made for himself, and which he wanted to live alone and unmolested.
 
Did not those flowers help him to keep his record of time that was passing? They had no right to vanish until the hot May days were upon him. How else should he know? Why had these people, with whom he had nothing in common, upon his privacy and violated it? What would they not rob him of next?
 
He knew well enough it was Easter; he had heard and seen signs yesterday in the store that told him so. And he guessed that his woods had been rifled to add to the mummery of the day.
 
M’sieur Michel sat himself down beside his table—centuries old—and brooded. He did not even notice his hounds that were pleading to be fed. As he in his mind the event of the morning—innocent as it was in itself—it grew in importance and assumed a significance not at first apparent. He could not remain passive under pressure of its . He rose to his feet, every impulse ............