on a hair.

He had been inclined to leave her alone when he saw in his fancy the
clean, simple, mindless, honest life that her fanciful girlhood would
settle down into as time should go on. But when in the figure of the
woodman there was painted visibly on the dusky sky that end for her which
he had foreseen, he was not indifferent to it; he resented it; he was
stirred to a vague desire to render it impossible.

If Jeannot had not gone by across the fields he would have left her and
let her alone from that night thenceforwards; as it was,--

"Good night, Bebee," he said to her. "Tomorrow I will finish the
Broodhuis and bring you your first book. Do not dream too much, or you
will prick your lace patterns all awry. Good night, pretty one."

Then he turned and went back through the green dim lanes to the city.

Bebee stood a moment looking after him, with a happy smile; then she
picked up the fallen pear-blossom, and ran home as fast as her feet would
take her.

That night she worked very late watering her flowers, and trimming them,
and then ironing out a little clean white cap for the morrow; and then
sitting down under the open lattice to prick out all old Annemie's
designs by the strong light of the full moon that flooded her hut with
its radiance.

But she sang all the time she worked, and the gay, pretty, wordless songs
floated across the water and across the fields, and woke some old people
in their beds as they lay with their windows open, and they turned and
crossed themselves, and said, "Dear heart!--this is the eve of the
Ascension, and the angels are so near we hear them."

But it was no angel; only the thing that is nearer heaven than anything
else,--a little human heart that is happy and innocent.

Bebee had only one sorrow that night. The pear-blossoms were all dead;
and no care could call them back even for an hour's blooming.

"He did not think when he struck them
down," she said to herself, regretfully.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Can I do any work for you, Bebee?" said black Jeannot in the daybreak,
pushing her gate open timidly with one hand.

"There is none to do, Jeannot. They want so little in this time of the
year--the flowers," said she, lifting her head from the sweet-peas she
was tying up to their sticks.

The woodman did not answer; he leaned over the half-open wicket, and
swayed it backwards and forwards under his bare arm. He was a good,
harmless, gentle fellow, swarthy as charc