“You wish to see me again then?” he asked her.  Bebee looked at him with troubled eyes, but with a sweet frank faith that had no hesitation in it.

“Yes! you are not like anything I ever knew, and if you will only help me to learn a little.  Sometimes I think I am not stupid, only ignorant; but I cannot be sure unless I try.”

He smiled; he was listlessly amused; the day before he had tempted the child merely because she was pretty, and to tempt her in that way seemed the natural course of things, but now there was something in her that touched him differently; the end would be the same, but he would change the means.

The sun had set.  There was a low, dull red glow still on the far edge of the plains—­that was all.  In the distant cottages little lights were twinkling.  The path grew dark.

“I will go away and let her alone,” he thought.  “Poor little soul! it would give itself lavishly, it would never be bought.  I will let it alone; the mind will go to sleep and the body will keep healthy, and strong, and pure, as people call it.  It would be a pity to play with both a day, and then throw them away as the boy threw the pear-blossom.  She is a little clod of earth that has field flowers growing in it.  I will let her alone, the flowers under the plough in due course will die, and she will be content among the other clods,—­if I let her alone.”

At that moment there went across the dark fields, against the dusky red sky, a young man with a pile of brushwood on his back, and a hatchet in his hand.

“You are late, Bebee,” he called to her in Flemish, and scowled at the stranger by her side.

“A good-looking lad; who is it?” said her companion.

“That is Jeannot, the son of old Sophie,” she answered him.  “He is so good—­oh, so good, you cannot think; he keeps his mother and three little sisters, and works so very, very hard in the forest, and yet he often finds time to dig my garden for me, and he chops all my wood in winter.”

They had come to where the road goes up by the king’s summer palace.  They were under great hanging beeches and limes.  There was a high gray wall, and over it the blossoming fruit boughs hung.  In a ditch full of long grass little kids bleated by their mothers.  Away on the left went the green fields of colza, and beetroot, and trefoil, with big forest trees here and there in their midst, and, against the blue low line of the far horizon, red mill-sails, and gray church spires; dreamy plaintive bells far away somewhere were ringing the sad Flemish carillon.

He paused and looked at her.

“I must bid you good night, Bebee; you are near your home now.”

She paused too and looked at him.

“But I shall see you to-morrow?”

There was the wistful, eager, anxious unconsciousness of appeal as when the night before she had asked him if he were angry.

He hesitated a moment.  If he said no, and went away out of the city wherever his listless and changeful whim called him, he knew how it would be with her; he knew what her life would be as surely as he knew the peach would come out of the peach-flower rosy on the wall there:  life in the little hut; among the neighbors; sleepy and safe and soulless;—­if he let her alone.