He went away with a heavy heart and a long-drawn step.  He would have preferred that she should have been angry with him.

Bebee, left alone, let the clothes drop off her pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, and shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book, and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with a smile on her face.

Only, as she slept, her ringers moved as if she were counting her beads, and her lips murmured,—­

“Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to think of—­yes.  I know—­all the poor, and all the little children.  But take care of him; he is called Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of Burgundy; you cannot miss him; and if you will look for him always, and have a heed that the angels never leave him, I will give you my great cactus glower—­my only one—­on your Feast of Roses this very year.  Oh, dear Mother, you will not forget!”

CHAPTER XII.

Bebee was a dreamer in her way, and aspired to be a scholar too.  But all the same, she was not a little fool.

She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest ways of living, and would have thought it as shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to other folk.

So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, full of strange fantasies, none the less was she out in her garden by daybreak; none the less did she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the fowls, and wash out her bit of linen and hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting hollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because they reached to the roof.

“What do you want with books, Bebee?” said Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, across the privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen.  “Franz told me you were reading last night.  It is the silver buckles have done that:  one mischief always begets another.”

“Where is the mischief, good Reine?” said Bebee, who was always prettily behaved with her elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold her own.

“The mischief will be in discontent,” said the sabot-maker’s wife.  “People live on their own little patch, and think it is the world; that is as it should be—­everybody within his own, like a nut in its shell.  But when you get reading, you hear of a swarm of things you never saw, and you fret because you cannot see them, and you dream, and dream, and a hole is burnt in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as lead.  You are like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves dead against the glass of a hothouse.”

Bebee smiled, reaching to spread out her linen.  But she said nothing.

“What good is it talking to them?” she thought; “they do not know.”

Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy seemed so far, far away; creatures of a distant world, that she had long left; it was no use talking, they never would understand.