When the dawn came the sun rose red and warm; the grass and boughs sparkled; a lark sang; Bebee awoke sad in heart, indeed, for her lost old friend, but brighter and braver.

“Each of them wants to get something out of me,” thought the child.  “Well, I will live alone, then, and do my duty, just as he said.  The flowers will never let any real harm come, though they do look so indifferent and smiling sometimes, and though not one of them hung their heads when his coffin was carried through them yesterday.”

That want of sympathy in the flower troubled her.

The old man had loved them so well; and they had all looked as glad as ever, and had laughed saucily in the sun, and not even a rosebud turned the paler as the poor still stiffened limbs went by in the wooden shell.

“I suppose God cares; but I wish they did.” said Bebee, to whom the garden was more intelligible than Providence.

“Why do you not care?” she asked the pinks, shaking the raindrops off their curled rosy petals.

The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and seemed to say, “Why should we care for anything, unless a slug be eating us?—­that is real woe, if you like.”

Bebee, without her sabots on, wandered thoughtfully among the sweet wet sunlightened labyrinths of blossom, her pretty bare feet treading the narrow grassy paths with pleasure in their coolness.

“He was so good to you!” she said reproachfully to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the painted sweet-peas.  “He never let you know heat or cold, he never let the worm gnaw or the snail harm you; he would get up in the dark to see after your wants; and when the ice froze over you, he was there to loosen your chains.  Why do you not care, anyone of you?”

“How silly you are!” said the flowers.  “You must be a butterfly or a poet, Bebee, to be as foolish as that.  Some one will do all he did.  We are of market value, you know.  Care, indeed! when the sun is so warm, and there is not an earwig in the place to trouble us.”

The flowers were not always so selfish as this; and perhaps the sorrow in Bebee’s heart made their callousness seem harder than it really was.

When we suffer very much ourselves, anything that smiles in the sun seems cruel—­a child, a bird, a dragon-fly—­nay, even a fluttering ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the wind.

There was a little shrine at the corner of the garden, set into the wall; a niche with a bit of glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered that no one could trace any feature of it.

It had been there for centuries, and was held in great veneration; and old Antoine had always cut the choicest buds of his roses and set them in a delf pot in front of it, every other morning all the summer long.  Bebee, whose religion was the sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly equal in strength and in ignorance,—­Bebee filled the delf pot anew carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers who were to her only as gentle guides and kindly playmates.