“Ah, yes—­and they marry afterwards—­yes.”

She said it softly, musingly, with no embarrassment; it was an unreal, remote thing to her, and yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague trouble that was infinitely sweet.

There is little talk of love in the lives of the poor; they have no space for it; love to them means more mouths to feed, more wooden shoes to buy, more hands to dive into the meagre bag of coppers.  Now and then a girl of the commune had been married, and had ploughing in the fields or to her lace-weaving in the city.  Bebee had thought little of it.

“They marry or they do not marry.  That is as it may be,” said Flamen, with a smile.  “Bebee, I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a love-dial of the daisies.  What is the story?  Oh, I have told you stories enough.  Gretchen’s you would not understand, just yet.”

“But what did the daisies say to her?”

“My dear, the daisies always say the same thing, because daisies always tell the truth and know men.  The daisies always say ‘a little’; it is the girl’s ear that tricks her, and makes her hear ’till death,’—­a folly and falsehood of which the daisy is not guilty.”

“But who says it if the daisy does not?”

“Ah, the devil perhaps—­who knows?  He has so much to do in these things.”

But Bebee did not smile; she had a look of horror in her blue eyes; she belonged to a peasantry who believed in exorcising the fiend by the aid of the cross, and who not so very many generations before had driven him out of human bodies by rack and flame.

She looked with a little wistful fear on the white, golden-eyed marguerites that lay on her lap.

“Do you think the fiend is in these?” she whispered, with awe in her voice.

Flamen smiled.  “When you count them he will be there, no doubt.”

Bebee threw them with a shudder on the grass.

“Have I spoilt your holiday, dear?” he said, with a certain self-reproach.

She was silent a minute, then she gathered up the daisies again, and stroked them and put them to her lips.

“It is not they that do wrong.  You say the girls’ ears deceive them.  It is the girls who want a lie and will not believe a truth because it humbles them; it is the girls that are to blame, not the daisies.  As for me, I will not ask the daisies anything ever, so the fiend will not enter into them.”

“Nor into you.  Poor little Bebee!”

“Why, you pity me for that?”

“Yes.  Because, if women never see the serpent’s face, neither do they ever scent the smell of the paradise roses; and it will be hard for you to die without a single rose d’amour in your pretty breast, poor little Bebee?”

“I do not understand.  But you frighten me a little.”

He rose and left his easel and threw himself at her feet on the grass; he took the little wooden shoes in his hands as reverently as he would have taken the broidered shoes of a duchess; he looked up at her with tender, smiling eyes.