She did not reason.  She did not question.  She did not look beyond that hour—­such is the privilege of youth.

“How I will read!  How I will learn!  How wise I will try to be; and how good, if I can!” she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under her weight, and looking with glad eyes at the goats as they frisked with their young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from the palace woods, and the frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes.

Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil and the need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latch of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well to draw its nightly draught for the dry garden.

“Oh, dear roses!” she said to them as she rained the silvery showers over their nodding heads.  “Oh, dear roses!—­tell me—­was ever anybody so happy as I am?  Oh, if you say ‘yes’ I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers that were only born yesterday!”

But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as she wished them to say,—­

“No—­no one—­ever before, Bebee—­no one ever before.”

For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heart puts into them.

An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and aged to make one of the pilgrimage.  He looked at the little quick-moving form, grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced on her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden.

“You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little one!” he said across the sweetbrier hedge.  “Nay, that was too bad; work, work, work—­thy pretty back should not be bent double yet.  You want a holiday, Bebee; well, the Fete Dieu is near.  Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a few sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds.  You sit dull in the market all day; you want a feast.”

Bebee colored behind the hedge, and ran in and brought three new-laid eggs that she had left in the flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust them on him through a break in the brier.  It was the first time she had ever done anything of which she might not speak:  she was ashamed, and yet the secret was so sweet to her.

“I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!” she murmured, with a tremulous breath and a shine in her eyes that the old man’s ears and sight were too dull to discern.

“So was she” muttered Jehan, as he thrust the eggs into his old patched blue blouse,—­“so was she.  And then a stumble—­a blow in the lane there—­a horse’s kick—­and all was over.  All over, my pretty one—­for ever and ever.”

CHAPTER XX.

On a sudden impulse Flamen, going through the woodland shadows to the city, paused and turned back; all his impulses were quick and swayed him now hither, now thither, in many contrary ways.