nd buying a sou's worth of bread and flet-milk at the first cottage that
she passed in bright, leaf-bowered Hoey-laert.

The forest was still all around her, with its exquisite life of bough and
blossom, and murmur of insect and of bird. She told her beads, praying as
she went, and was almost happy.

God would not let him die. Oh, no, not till she had kissed him once more,
and could die with him.

The hares ran across the path, and the blue butterflies flew above-head.
There was purple gloom of pine wood, and sparkling verdure of aspen and
elm. There were distant church carillons ringing, and straight golden
shafts of sunshine streaming.

She was quite sure God would not let him die.

She hoped that he might be very poor. At times he had talked as if he
were, and then she might be of so much use. She knew how to deal with
fever and suffering. She had sat up many a night with the children of the
village. The gray sisters had taught her many of their ways of battling
with disease; and she could make fresh cool drinks, and she could brew
beautiful remedies from simple herbs. There was so much that she might
do; her fancy played with it almost happily. And then, only to touch his
hand, only to hear his voice; her heart rose at the thought, as a lark to
its morning song.

At Rixensart, buried in its greenery, as she went through it in morning
light, some peasants greeted her cheerily, and called to her to rest in a
house porch, and gave her honey and bread. She could not eat much; her
tongue was parched and her throat was dry, but the kindness was precious
to her, and she went on her road the stronger for it.

"It is a long way to walk to Paris," said the woman, with some curious
wonder. Bebee smiled, though her eyes grew wet.

"She has the look of the little Gesu," said the Rixensart people; and
they watched her away with a vague timid pity.

So she went on through Ottignies and La Roche to Villers, and left the
great woods and the city chimes behind her, and came through the green
abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and Fleurus, and so into the coal
and iron fields that lie round Charleroi.

Here her heart grew sick, and her courage sank under the noise and the
haste, before the blackness and the hideousness. She had never seen
anything like it. She thought it was hell, with the naked, swearing,
fighting people, and the red fires leaping night and day. Nevertheless,
if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her a