-no more.

And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse of the blue sky swam round
her indistinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear and
were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because of the great sudden
unintelligible happiness that seemed to bear her little life away on it
as a sea wave bears a young child off its feet.

"You do not feel alone now, Bebee?" he whispered to her.

"No!" she answered him softly under her breath, and sat still, while all
her body quivered like a leaf.

No; how could she ever be alone now that this sweet, soft, unutterable
touch would always be in memory upon her; how could she wish ever again
now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or the gray mouse in the
hedge of hawthorn?

At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a
sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a
fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.

"It is time to go home, Bebee," said Flamen.

CHAPTER XVIII.

So it came to pass that Bebee's day in the big forest came and went as
simply almost as any day that she had played away with the Varnhart
children under the beech shadows of Cambre woods.

And when he took her to her hut at sunset before the pilgrims had
returned there was a great bewildered tumult of happiness in her heart,
but there was no memory with her that prevented her from looking at the
shrine in the wall as she passed it, and saying with a quick gesture of
the cross on brow and bosom,--

"Ah, dear Holy Mother, how good you have been! and I am back again, you
see, and I will work harder than ever because of all this joy that you
have given me."

And she took another moss-rose and changed it for that of the morning,
which was faded, and said to Flamen.--

"Look--she sends you this. Now do you know what I mean? One is more
content when She is content."

He did not answer, but he held her hands against him a moment as they
fastened in the rose bud.

"Not a word to the pilgrims, Bebee--you remember?"

"Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them every time I pray--it will be
like being silent about that--it will be no more wrong than that."

But there was a touch of anxiety in the words; she was not quite certain;
she wanted to be reassured. Instinct moved her not to speak of him; but
habit made it seem wrong to her to have any secret from the people who
had been about her from her birth.

He did not reassure he