tered her thoughts.

Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as Bebee was, would never
have lighted her own candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed any
one else's lamp to lighten the love darkness.

To Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a
wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a
gift of God, as the sun was.

She took his going and coming as she took that of the sun, never dreaming
of reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty
night he shone on any other worlds than hers.

It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reason
ere it know itself to be faith. Bebee never reasoned any more than her
roses did.

The good folks in the market place watched her a little anxiously; they
thought ill of that little moss-rose that every day found its way to one
wearer only; but after all they did not see much, and the neighbors
nothing at all. For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most of
the time that he spent with Bebee was in the quiet evening shadows, as
she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.

Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but with
her it had always been different. Antoine had always been with her up to
the day of his death; and after his death she had sat in the same place,
surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to her
would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler's strap or from the
tinker's hammer. There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any
harm--a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne
de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time
drove a milk cart over the snow. This girl would get at her sometimes,
and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of the
town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was
Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets
bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-a-banc, with the
horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the
old horse's ears.

"She is such a little close sly thing!" thought the fruit girl, sulkily.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

"We dance almost every evening, the children and I," Bebee had
answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and bal