with the shrewd Flemish
thought after the main chance.

"Nothing," Bebee would answer, with a quick color in her face; and they
would reply in contemptuous reproof, "Careless little fool; you should
make enough to buy you wood all winter. When the man from Ghent painted
Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing still so
long in the clover. The Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if it
be the cow that makes the difference."

Bebee was silent, weeding her carnation bed;--what could she tell them
that they would understand?

She seemed so far away from them all--those good friends of her
childhood--now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened to
her sight.

She lived in a dream.

Whether she sat in the market place taking copper coins, or in the
moonlight with a book on her knees, it was all the same. Her feet ran,
her tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not neglect her goat or her
garden, she did not forsake her house labor or her good deeds to old
Annemie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt one
touch, she only saw one face.

Here and there--one in a million--there is a female thing that can love
like this, once and forever.

Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the Mater Dolorosa.

He had something nearer akin to affection for her than he had ever had in
his life for anything, but he was never in love with her--no more in
love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in his
breast. Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft,
tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heart
heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch her
changes from shyness to confidence, and from frankness again into fear,
was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.

That he spared her as far as he did,--when after all she would have
married Jeannot anyhow,--and that he sketched her face in the open air,
and never entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own old palace in
the city, was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly knew whether to
feel respect or ridicule; anyway, it seemed virtue to him.

So long as he did not seduce the body, it seemed to him that it could
never matter how he slew the soul,--the little, honest, happy, pure,
frank soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a robin's song
to the winter sun.

"Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no better tha