The sun came and touched the lichens of the roof into gold.

Bebee smiled at it gayly as it rose above the tops of the trees, and shone on all the little villages scattered over the plains.

“Ah, dear Sun!” she cried to it.  “I am going to be wise.  I am going into great Rubes’ country.  I am going to hear of the Past and the Future.  I am going to listen to what the Poets say.  The swallows never would tell me anything; but now I shall know as much as they know.  Are you not glad for me, O Sun?”

The Sun came over the trees, and heard and said nothing.  If he had answered at all he must have said,—­

“The only time when a human soul is either wise or happy is in that one single moment when the hour of my own shining or of the moon’s beaming seems to that single soul to be past and present and future, to be at once the creation and the end of all things.  Faust knew that; so will you.”

But the Sun shone on and held his peace.  He sees all things ripen and fall.  He can wait.  He knows the end.  It is always the same.

He brings the fruit out of the peach-flower, and rounds it and touches it into ruddiest rose and softest gold:  but the sun knows well that the peach must drop—­whether into the basket to be eaten by kings, or on to the turf to be eaten by ants.  What matter which very much after all?

The Sun is not a cynic; he is only wise because he is Life and he is Death, the creator and the corrupter of all things.

CHAPTER IX.

But Bebee, who only saw in the sun the sign of daily work, the brightness of the face of the world, the friend of the flowers, the harvest-man of the poor, the playmate of the birds and butterflies, the kindly light that the waking birds and the ringing carillon welcomed,—­Bebee, who was not at all afraid of him, smiled at his rays and saw in them only fairest promise of a cloudless midsummer day as she gave her last crumb to the swallows, dropped down off the thatch, and busied herself in making bread that Mere Krebs would bake for her, until it was time to cut her flowers and go down into the town.

When her loaves were made and she had run over with them to the mill-house and back again, she attired herself with more heed than usual, and ran to look at her own face in the mirror of the deep well-water—­other glass she had none.

She was used to hear herself called pretty; bat she had never thought about it at all till now.  The people loved her; she had always believed that they had only said it as a sort of kindness, as they said, “God keep you.”  But now—­

“He told me I was like a flower,” she thought to herself, and hung over the well to see.  She did not know very well what he had meant; but the sentence stirred in her heart as a little bird under tremulous leaves.

She waited ten minutes full, leaning and looking down, while her eyes, that were like the blue iris, smiled back to her from the brown depths below.  Then she went and kneeled down before the old shrine in the wall of the garden.