telligible than Providence.

"Why do you not care?" she asked the pinks, shaking the raindrops off
their curled rosy petals.

The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and seemed to say, "Why
should we care for anything, unless a slug be eating us?--_that_ is
real woe, if you like."

Bebee, without her sabots on, wandered thoughtfully among the sweet wet
sunlightened labyrinths of blossom, her pretty bare feet treading the
narrow grassy paths with pleasure in their coolness.

"He was so good to you!" she said reproachfully to the great gaudy
gillyflowers and the painted sweet-peas. "He never let you know heat or
cold, he never let the worm gnaw or the snail harm you; he would get up
in the dark to see after your wants; and when the ice froze over you, he
was there to loosen your chains. Why do you not care, anyone of you?"

"How silly you are!" said the flowers. "You must be a butterfly or a
poet, Bebee, to be as foolish as that. Some one will do all he did. We
are of market value, you know. Care, indeed! when the sun is so warm, and
there is not an earwig in the place to trouble us."

The flowers were not always so selfish as this; and perhaps the sorrow in
Bebee's heart made their callousness seem harder than it really was.

When we suffer very much ourselves, anything that smiles in the sun seems
cruel--a child, a bird, a dragon-fly--nay, even a fluttering ribbon, or a
spear-grass that waves in the wind.

There was a little shrine at the corner of the garden, set into the wall;
a niche with a bit of glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered that
no one could trace any feature of it.

It had been there for centuries, and was held in great veneration; and
old Antoine had always cut the choicest buds of his roses and set them in
a delf pot in front of it, every other morning all the summer long.
Bebee, whose religion was the sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and
Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly
equal in strength and in ignorance,--Bebee filled the delf pot anew
carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and
prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers
who were to her only as gentle guides and kindly playmates.

Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother?

She was almost fearful that she was; but then the Holy Mother loved
flowers so well, Bebee would not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid.

"When one cuts the