She heard them patiently till the cackle of shrill voices had exhausted itself, and the six women stood on the sunny mud floor of the hut eyeing each other with venomous glances; for though they were good neighbors at all times, each, in this matter, was hungry for the advantages to be got out of old Antoine’s plot of ground.  They were very poor; they toiled in the scorched or frozen fields all weathers, or spent from dawn to nightfall poring over their cobweb lace; and to save a son or gain a cabbage was of moment to them only second to the keeping of their souls secure of heaven by Lenten mass and Easter psalm.

Bebee listened to them all, and the tears dried on her cheeks, and her pretty rosebud lips curled close in one another.

“You are very good, no doubt, all of you,” she said at last.  “But I cannot tell you that I am thankful, for my heart is like a stone, and I think it is not so very much for me as it is for the hut that you are speaking.  Perhaps it is wrong in me to say so; yes, I am wrong, I am sure,—­you are all kind, and I am only Bebee.  But you see he told me to live here and take care of the flowers, and I must do it, that is certain.  I will ask Father Francis, if you wish:  but if he tells me I am wrong, as you do.  I shall stay here all the same.”

And in answer to their expostulations and condemnation, she only said the same thing over again always, in different words, but to the same steadfast purpose.  The women clamored about her for an hour in reproach and rebuke; she was a baby indeed, she was a little fool, she was a naughty, obstinate child, she was an ungrateful, wilful little creature, who ought to be beaten till she was blue, if only there was anybody that had the right to do it!

“But there is nobody that has the right,” said Bebee, getting angry and standing upright on the floor, with Antoine’s old gray cat in her round arms.  “He told me to stay here, and he would not have said so if it had been wrong; and I am old enough to do for myself, and I am not afraid, and who is there that would hurt me?  Oh, yes; go and tell Father Francis, if you like!  I do not believe he will blame me, but if he do, I must bear it.  Even if he shut the church door on me, I will obey Antoine, and the flowers will know I am right, and they will let no evil spirits touch me, for the flowers are strong for that; they talk to the angels in the night.”

What use was it to argue with a little idiot like this?  Indeed, peasants never do argue; they use abuse.

It is their only form of logic.

They used it to Bebee, rating her soundly, as became people who were old enough to be her grandmothers, and who knew that she had been raked out of their own pond, and had no more real place in creation than a water rat, as one might say.

The women were kindly, and had never thrown this truth against her before, and in fact, to be a foundling was no sort of disgrace to their sight; but anger is like wine, and makes the depths of the mind shine clear, and all the mud that is in the depths stink in the light; and in their wrath at not sharing Antoine’s legacy, the good souls said bitter things that in calm moments they would no more have uttered than they would have taken up a knife to slit her throat.