more worthy of
him against he should return.

The winter passed away somehow, she did not know how.

It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen silence: that was all. She
studied hard, and had got a quaint, strange, deep, scattered knowledge
out of her old books; her face had lost all its roundness and color, but,
instead, the forehead had gained breadth and the eyes had the dim fire of
a student's.

Every night when she shut her volumes she thought,--

"I am a little nearer him. I know a little more."

Just so every morning, when she bathed her hands in the chilly water, she
thought to herself, "I will make my skin as soft as I can for him, that
it may be like the ladies' he has loved."

Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as a passion. Bebee's was
so. Like George Herbert's serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt
away from a floor without doing it to the service of her lord.

Only Bebee's lord was a king of earth, made of earth's dust and vanities.

But what did she know of that?

CHAPTER XXV.

The winter went by, and the snow-drops and crocus and pale hepatica
smiled at her from the black clods. Every other springtime Bebee had run
with fleet feet under the budding trees down into the city, and had sold
sweet little wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow was
melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis.

"The winter is gone," the townspeople used to say; "look, there is Bebee
with the flowers."

But this year they did not see the little figure itself like a rosy
crocus standing against the brown timbers of the Maison de Roi.

Bebee had not heart to pluck a single blossom of them all. She let them
all live, and tended them so that the little garden should look its best
and brightest to him when his hand should lift its latch.

Only he was so long coming--so very long; the violets died away, and the
first rosebuds came in their stead, and still Bebee looked every dawn and
every nightfall vainly down the empty road.

Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness of waiting.

Pain they will bear, and privation they will pass through, fire and water
and storm will not appall them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but
waiting--the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that drop one by one
in their eternal sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly
but surely, as the slow dropping of water frets away rock.

The summer came.

Nearly a year had gone by. Bebee worke