“And yet you want to see new lands?” he pursued.  “What is it you want to see there?”

“Ah, quite other things than these,” cried Bebee, still leaning her cheeks on her hands.  “That dancing and singing is very pretty and merry, but it is just as good when old Claude fiddles and the children skip.  This wine, you tell me, is something very great; but fresh milk is much nicer, I think.  It is not these kind of things I want—­I want to know all about the people who lived before us; I want to know what the stars are, and what the wind is; I want to know where the lark goes when you lose him out of sight against the sun; I want to know how the old artists got to see God, that they could paint him and all his angels as they have done; I want to know how the voices got into the bells, and how they can make one’s heart beat, hanging up there as they do, all alone among the jackdaws; I want to know what it is when I walk in the fields in the morning, and it is all gray and soft and still, and the corn-crake cries in the wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes, that makes me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I were so very near God, and yet so all alone, and such a little thing; because you see the mouse she has her hole, and the crake her own people, but I—­”

Her voice faltered a little and stopped:  she had never before thought out into words her own loneliness; from the long green arbor the voices of the girls and the students sang,—­

“Ah! le doux son d’un baiser tendre!”

Flamen was silent.  The poet in him—­and in an artist there is always more or less of the poet—­kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to pity and respect.

They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had little wisdom in them, and were quite childish in their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously as a man very base and callous may at times be moved by the look in a dying deer’s eyes, or by the sound of a song that some lost love once sang.

He rose and drew her hands away, and took her small face between his own hands instead.

“Poor little Bebee!” he said gently, looking down on her with a breath that was almost a sigh.  “Poor little Bebee!—­to envy the corncrake and the mouse!”

She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very warm under his touch, but her eyes looked still into his without fear.

He stooped and touched her forehead with his lips, gently and without passion, almost reverently; she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled a little and drew back, but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed; she was too simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of passion and of consciousness.

It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs people in the villages with a little green cart and a yellow dog—­no more.

And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse of the blue sky swam round her indistinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear and were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because of the great sudden unintelligible happiness that seemed to bear her little life away on it as a sea wave bears a young child off its feet.