“It is natural, of course—­he has his world—­he does not think often of me—­there is no reason why he should be as good as he is,” she said to herself as she went slowly over the stones.

She had the dog’s soul—­only she did not know it.

But the tears Fell down her cheeks, as she walked.

It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the sound of the music coming in through the trees, and those women,—­she had seen such women before; sometimes in the winter nights, going home from the lacework, she had stopped at the doors of the palaces, or of the opera house, when the carriages were setting down their brilliant burdens; and sometimes on the great feast days she had seen the people of the court going out to some gala at the theatre, or some great review of troops, or some ceremonial of foreign sovereigns; but she had never thought about them before; she had never wondered whether velvet was better to wear than woollen serge, or-diamonds lighter on the head than a little cap of linen.

But now—­

Those women seemed to her so dazzling, so wondrously, so superhumanly beautiful; they seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, rose and purple and gold, that outblazed the sun on the south border of her little garden, and blanched all the soft color out of the homely roses, and pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and double-stocks, that had bloomed there ever since the days of Waterloo.

But the dahlias had no scent; and Bebee wondered if these women had any heart in them,—­they looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity.  To the child, whose dreams of womanhood were evolved from the face of the Mary of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel in the blue coif whose face has a light as of the sun,—­to her who had dreamed her way into vague perceptions of her own sex’s maidenhood and maternity by help of those great pictures which had been before her sight from infancy, there was some taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness in these jewelled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the grand dahlias missed a flower’s divinity, being scentless.

She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; hardy, fragrant, clean, tender, flowering by the wayside, full of honey, though only nourished on the turf and the stones, these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright, scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dim sense of pain and shame.

Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to Father Francis:—­

“I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied them; and I could not pray to Mary last night for thinking of them, for I hated them so much.”

But she did not say,—­

“I hated them because they were with him.”

Out of the purest little soul, Love entering drives forth Candor.

“That is not like you at all, Bebee,” said the good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the bricks of his little bare study, where all the books he ever spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping.