“You do not feel alone now, Bebee?” he whispered to her.

“No!” she answered him softly under her breath, and sat still, while all her body quivered like a leaf.

No; how could she ever be alone now that this sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always be in memory upon her; how could she wish ever again now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or the gray mouse in the hedge of hawthorn?

At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.

“It is time to go home, Bebee,” said Flamen.

CHAPTER XVIII.

So it came to pass that Bebee’s day in the big forest came and went as simply almost as any day that she had played away with the Varnhart children under the beech shadows of Cambre woods.

And when he took her to her hut at sunset before the pilgrims had returned there was a great bewildered tumult of happiness in her heart, but there was no memory with her that prevented her from looking at the shrine in the wall as she passed it, and saying with a quick gesture of the cross on brow and bosom,—­

“Ah, dear Holy Mother, how good you have been! and I am back again, you see, and I will work harder than ever because of all this joy that you have given me.”

And she took another moss-rose and changed it for that of the morning, which was faded, and said to Flamen.—­

“Look—­she sends you this.  Now do you know what I mean?  One is more content when She is content.”

He did not answer, but he held her hands against him a moment as they fastened in the rose bud.

“Not a word to the pilgrims, Bebee—­you remember?”

“Yes, I will remember.  I do not tell them every time I pray—­it will be like being silent about that—­it will be no more wrong than that.”

But there was a touch of anxiety in the words; she was not quite certain; she wanted to be reassured.  Instinct moved her not to speak of him; but habit made it seem wrong to her to have any secret from the people who had been about her from her birth.

He did not reassure her; her anxiety was pretty to watch, and he left the trouble in her heart like a bee in the chalice of a lily.  Besides, the little wicket gate was between them; he was musing whether he would push it open once more.

Her fate was in the balance, though she did not dream it:  he had dealt with her tenderly, honestly, sacredly all that day—­almost as much so as stupid Jeannot could have done.  He had been touched by her trust in him, and by the unconscious beauty of her fancies, into a mood that was unlike all his life and habits.  But after all, he said to himself—­

After all!—­

Where he stood in the golden evening he saw the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled eves, the little brown hands that still tried to fasten the rosebud, the young peach-like skin where the wind stirred the bodice;—­she was only a little Flemish peasant, this poor little Bebee, a little thing of the fields and the streets, for all the dreams of God that abode with her.  After all—­soon or late—­the end would be always the same.  What matter!