In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long table, there was a noisy party of students and girls of the city; their laughter was mellowed by distance as it came over the breadth of the garden, and they sang, with fresh shrill Flemish voices, songs from an opera bouffe of La Monnaie.

It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.

There was everywhere about an air of light-hearted enjoyment.  Bebee sat with a wondering look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the natural instincts of her youth, that were like curled-up fruit buds in her, unclosed softly to the light of joy.

“Is life always like this in your Rubes’ land?” she asked him; that vague far-away country of which she never asked him anything more definite, and which yet was so clear before her fancy.

“Yes,” he made answer to her.  “Only—­instead of those leaves, flowers and pomegranates; and in lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes are esteemed like king’s jewels; and in place of those little green arbors, great white palaces, cool and still, with ilex woods and orange groves and sapphire seas beyond them.  Would you like to come there, Bebee?—­and wear laces such as you weave, and hear singing and laughter all night long, and never work any more in the mould of the garden, or spin any more at that tiresome wheel, or go any more out in the wind, and the rain, and the winter mud to the market?”

Bebee listened, leaning her round elbows on the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as a child gravely listens to a fairy story.  But the sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had chosen, passed by her.

It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of the woods with a ruby instead of a cherry.  The bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the blossoms of the wind-tossed pear boughs; the gem, though it be a monarch’s, will only strike hard and tasteless on its beak.

“I would like to see it all,” said Bebee, musingly trying to follow out her thoughts.  “But as for the garden work and the spinning—­that I do not want to leave, because I have done it all my life; and I do not think I should care to wear lace—­it would tear very soon; one would be afraid to run; and do you see I know how it is made—­all that lace.  I know how blind the eyes get over it, and how the hearts ache; I know how the old women starve, and the little children cry; I know that there is not a sprig of it that is not stitched with pain; the great ladies do not think, I dare say, because they have never worked at it or watched the others:  but I have.  And so, you see, I think if I wore it I should feel sad, and if a nail caught on it I should feel as if it were tearing the flesh of my friends.  Perhaps I say it badly; but that is what I feel.”

“You do not say it badly—­you speak well, for you speak from the heart,” he answered her, and felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her with the gold and purple of a baser world than any that she knew.