use against the hosts of
Spain.

To Bebee it was as an enchanted land, and every play of light and shade,
every hare speeding across the paths, every thrush singing in the leaves,
every little dog-rose or harebell that blossomed in the thickets, was to
her a treasure, a picture, a poem, a delight.

He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vincennes and of Versailles in the
student days of his youth: little work-girls fresh from chalets of the
Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, who had brought their poor
little charms to perish in Paris; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and
amidst the gilded shop signs till they were as pale and thin as their own
starved balsams; and who, when they saw the green woods, laughed and
cried a little, and thought of the broad sun-swept fields, and wished
that they were back again behind their drove of cows, or weeding among
the green grapes.

But those little work-girls had been mere homely daisies, and daisies
already with the dust of the pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon
them.

Bebee was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet dog-roses that she found in
the thickets of thorn.

He had meant to treat her as he had used to do those work-girls--a little
wine, a little wooing, a little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly
and brief as a rainbow--one midsummer day and night--then a handful of
gold, a caress, a good-morrow, and forgetfulness ever afterwards--that
was what he had meant when he had brought her out to the forest of
Soignies.

But--she was different, this child.

He made the great sketch of her for his Gretchen, sitting on a moss-grown
trunk, with marguerites in her hand; he sent for their breakfast far into
the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth into early peaches and costly
sweetmeats; he wandered with her hither and thither, and told her tales
out of the poets and talked to her in the dreamy, cynical, poetical
manner that was characteristic of him, being half artificial and half
sorrowful, as his temper was.

But Bebee, all unconscious, intoxicated with happiness, and yet touched
by it into that vague sadness which the summer sun brings with it even to
young things, if they have soul in them,--Bebee said to him what the
work-girls of Paris never had done.

Beautiful things: things fantastic, ignorant, absurd, very simple, very
unreasonable oftentimes, but things beautiful always, and sometimes even
very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a certain li