She stood and looked at him with frank and grateful eyes; she could hardly believe that he was here; he, the stranger of Rubes’ land, in her own little rush-covered home.

But she was not embarrassed by it; she was glad and proud.

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings,—­the dignity that comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence.  Bebee had this, and she had more still than this:  she had the absolute simplicity of childhood with her still.

Some women have it still when they are four-score.

She could have looked at him forever, she was so happy; she cared nothing now for those dazzling dahlias—­he had left them; he was actually here—­here in her own, little dear home, with the cocks looking in at the threshold, and the sweet-peas nodding at the lattice, and the starling crying, “Bonjour!  Bonjour!”

“You are tired, I am sure you must be tired,” she said, pulling her little bed forward for him to sit on, for there were only two wooden stools in the hut, and no chair at all.

Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes from his hand, and would have kneeled and taken the dust off his boots if he would have let her; and went hither and thither gladly and lightly, bringing him a wooden bowl of milk and the rest of the slender fare, and cutting as quick as thought fresh cresses and lettuce from her garden, and bringing him, as the crown of all, Father Francis’s honey-comb on vine-leaves, with some pretty sprays of box and mignonette scattered about it—­doing all this with a swift, sweet grace that robbed the labor of all look of servitude, and looking at him ever and again with a smile that said as clearly as any words, “I cannot do much, but what I do, I do with all my heart.”

There was something in the sight of her going and coming in those simple household errands, across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her cows to pasture may move a listener who indifferent has heard the swell of the organ of La Hague, or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo.

The gray lavender blowing at the house door has its charm for those who are tired of the camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of midnight suppers.

This man was not good.  He was idle and vain, and amorous and cold, and had been spoiled by the world in which he had passed his days; but he had the temper of an artist:  he had something, too, of a poet’s fancy; he was vaguely touched and won by this simple soul that looked at him out of Bebee’s eyes with some look that in all its simplicity had a divine gleam in it that made him half ashamed.

He had known women by the thousand, good women and bad; women whom he had dealt ill with and women who had dealt ill with him; but this he had not known—­this frank, fearless, tender, gay, grave, innocent, industrious little life, helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself, working for itself and for others, and vaguely seeking all the while some unseen light, some unknown god, with a blind faith so infinitely ignorant and yet so infinitely pathetic.