Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as Bebee was, would never have lighted her own candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed any one else’s lamp to lighten the love darkness.

To Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a gift of God, as the sun was.

She took his going and coming as she took that of the sun, never dreaming of reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty night he shone on any other worlds than hers.

It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reason ere it know itself to be faith.  Bebee never reasoned any more than her roses did.

The good folks in the market place watched her a little anxiously; they thought ill of that little moss-rose that every day found its way to one wearer only; but after all they did not see much, and the neighbors nothing at all.  For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most of the time that he spent with Bebee was in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.

Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but with her it had always been different.  Antoine had always been with her up to the day of his death; and after his death she had sat in the same place, surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to her would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler’s strap or from the tinker’s hammer.  There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any harm—­a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time drove a milk cart over the snow.  This girl would get at her sometimes, and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of the town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-a-banc, with the horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the old horse’s ears.

“She is such a little close sly thing!” thought the fruit girl, sulkily.  To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

“We dance almost every evening, the children and I,” Bebee had answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at the wine shops.  “That does just as well.  And I have seen Kermesse once at Malines—­it was beautiful.  I went with Mere Dax, but it cost a great deal I know, though she did not let me pay.”

“You little fool!” the fruit girl would say, and grin, and eat a pear.

But the good honest old women who sat about in the Grande Place, hearing, had always taken the fruit girl to task, when they got her by herself.