ut her from him quickly and went
out.

She ran to him, and threw herself on the damp ground and held him there,
and leaned her forehead on his feet. But though he looked at her with wet
eyes, he did not yield, and he still said,--

"I will come back soon--very soon; be quiet, dear, let me go."

Then he kissed her once more many times, and put her gently within the
door and closed it.

A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went to his heart, but he did not
turn; he went on through the wet, green little garden, and the curling
leaves, where he had found peace and had left desolation.

CHAPTER XXI.

"I will let her alone, and she will marry Jeannot," thought Flamen; and
he believed himself a good man for once in his life, and pitied himself
for having become a sentimentalist.

She would marry Jeannot, and bear many children, as those people always
did; and ruddy little peasants would cling about these pretty, soft,
little breasts of hers; and she would love them after the manner of such
women, and be very content clattering over the stones in her wooden
shoes; and growing brown and stout, and more careful after money, and
ceasing to dream of unknown things, and not seeing God at all in the
fields, but looking low and beholding only the ears of the gleaning wheat
and the feet of the tottering children; and so gaining her bread, and
losing her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth till she dropped
into it like one of her own wind-blown wall-flowers when the bee has
sucked out all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up all its
bloom:--yes, of course, she would marry Jeannot and end so!

Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was the one great matter.

So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, and went on his way out of the
chiming city as its matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain
regret, and the only innocent affection that had ever awakened in him;
and thought of his self-negation with half admiration and half derision;
and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his amorous, cynical,
changeful, passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said to himself as
he saw the last line of the low green plains shine against the sun, "She
will marry Jeannot--of course, she will marry Jeannot. And my Gretchen is
greater than Scheffer's."

What else mattered very much, after all, except what they would say in
Paris of Gretchen?

CHAPTER XXII.

People saw that Bebee had grown very