“All the people are gone on a pilgrimage,” she explained to him when he asked her why her village was so silent this bright morning.  “They are gone to pray for a fine harvest, and that she wants herself as well—­it costs seven francs apiece.  They take their food with them; they go and laugh and eat in the fields.  I think it is nonsense.  One can say one’s prayers just as well here.  Mere Krebs thinks so too, but then she says, ’If I do not go, it will look ill; people will say I am irreligious; and as we make so much by flour, God would think it odd for me to be absent; and, besides, it is only seven francs there and back; and if it does please Heaven, that is cheap, you know.  One will get it over and over again in Paradise.’  That is what Mere Krebs says.  But, for me, I think it is nonsense.  It cannot please God to go by train and eat galette and waste a whole day in getting dusty.

“When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I do give up a thing I love, and I let it wither on her altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here all the week, and then, of course, she sees that I have done it out of gratitude.  But that is different:  that I am sorry to do, and yet I am glad to do it out of love.  Do you not know?”

“Yes, I know very well.  But is the Virgin all that you love like this?”

“No; there is the garden, and there is Antoine—­he is dead, I know.  But I think that we should love the dead all the better, not the less, because they cannot speak or say that they are angry; and perhaps one pains them very much when one neglects them, and if they are ever so sad, they cannot rise and rebuke one—­that is why I would rather forget the flowers for the Church than I would the flowers for his grave, because God can punish me, of course, if he like, but Antoine never can—­any more—­now.”

“You are logical in your sentiment, my dear,” said Flamen, who was more moved than he cared to feel.  “The union is a rare one in your sex.  Who taught you to reason?”

“No one.  And I do not know what to be logical means.  Is it that you laugh at me?”

“No.  I do not laugh.  And your pilgrims—­they are gone for all day?”

“Yes.  They are gone to the Sacred Heart at St. Marie en Bois.  It is on the way to Liege.  They will come back at nightfall.  And some of them will be sure to have drunk too much, and the children will get so cross.  Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, ’Do not mix up prayer and play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey’; but I do not know why he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough—­sweeter than anything, I think.  When I pray to the Virgin to let me see you next day, I go to bed quite happy, because she will do it, I know, if it will be good for me.”

“But if it were not good for you, Bebee?  Would you cease to wish it then?”

He rose as he spoke, and went across the floor and drew away her hand that was parting the flax, and took it in his own and stroked it, indulgently and carelessly, as a man may stroke the soft fur of a young cat.