“Our Lady?—­oh, poor little simpleton!—­where will her reign be when Ignorance has once been cut down root and branch?” he thought to himself:  but he only answered,—­

“But whether she like it or not, Bebee?—­you beg the question, my dear; you are—­you are not so frank as usual—­think, and tell me honestly?”

He knew quite well, but it amused him to see the perplexed trouble that this, the first divided duty of her short years, brought with it.

Bebee looked at him, and loosened her hand from his, and sat quite still.  Her lips had a little quiver in them.

“I think.” she said at last, “I think—­if it be wrong, still I will wish it—­yes.  Only I will not tell myself it is right.  I will just say to Our Lady, ‘I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot help it’ So, I will not deceive her at all; and perhaps in time she may forgive.  But I think you only say it to try me.  It cannot, I am sure, be wrong—­any more than it is to talk to Jeannot or to Bac.”

He had driven her into the subtleties of doubt, but the honest little soul in her found a way out, as a flower in a cellar finds its way through the stones to light.

He plucked the ivy leaves and threw them at the chickens on the bricks without, with a certain impatience in the action.  The simplicity and the directness of the answer disarmed him; he was almost ashamed to use against her the weapons of his habitual warfare.  It was like a maitre d’armes fencing with bare steel against a little naked child armed with a blest palm-sheaf.

When she had thus brought him all she had, and he to please her had sat down to the simple food, she gathered a spray of roses and set it in a pot beside him, then left him and went and stood at a little distance, waiting, with her hands lightly crossed on her chest, to see if there were anything that he might want.

He ate and drank well to please her, looking at her often as he did so.

“I break your bread, Bebee,” he said, with a tone that seemed strange to her,—­“I break your bread.  I must keep Arab faith with you.”

“What is that?”

“I mean—­I must never betray you.”

“Betray me How could you?”

“Well—­hurt you in any way.”

“Ah, I am sure you would never do that.”

He was silent, and looked at the spray of roses.

“Sit down and spin,” he said impatiently.  “I am ashamed to see you stand there, and a woman never looks so well as when she spins.  Sit down, and I will eat the good things you have brought me.  But I cannot if you stand and look.”

“I beg your pardon.  I did not know,” she said, ashamed lest she should have seemed rude to him; and she drew out her wheel under the light of the lattice, and sat down to it, and began to disentangle the threads.

It was a pretty picture—­the low, square casement; the frame of ivy, the pink and white of the climbing sweet-peas:  the girl’s head; the cool, wet leaves:  the old wooden spinning-wheel, that purred like a sleepy cat.