He knew that the hour was come—­that he must leave her and spare her, as to himself he phrased it, or teach her the love words that the daisies whisper to women.

And why not?—­anyway she would marry Jeannot.

He, half-way to the town, walked back again and paused a moment at the gate; an emotion half pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him.

Anyway he would leave her in a few days:  Paris had again opened her arms to him; his old life awaited him; women who claimed him by imperious, amorous demands reproached him; and after all this day he had got the Gretchen of his ideal, a great picture for the future of his fame.

As he would leave her anyway so soon, he would leave her unscathed—­poor little field flower—­he could never take it with him to blossom or wither in Paris.

His world would laugh too utterly if he made for himself a mistress out of a little Fleming in two wooden shoes.  Besides—­

Besides, something that was half weak and half noble moved him not to lead this child, in her trust and her ignorance, into ways that when she awakened from her trance would seem to her shameful and full of sorrow.  For he knew that Bebee was not as others are.

He turned back and knocked at the hut door and opened it.

Bebee was just beginning to undress herself; she had taken off her white kerchief and her wooden shoes; her pretty shoulders and her little neck shone white in the moon; her feet were bare on the mud floor.

She started with a cry and threw the handkerchief again on her shoulders, but there was no fear of him; only the unconscious instinct of her girlhood.

He thought for a moment that he would not go away until the morrow—­

“Did you want me?” said Bebee softly, with happy eyes of surprise and yet a little startled, fearing some evil might have happened to him that he should have returned thus.

“No; I do not want you, dear,” he said gently; no—­he did not want her, poor little soul; she wanted him, but he—­there were so many of these things in his life, and he liked her too well to love her.

“No, dear, I did not want you,” said Flamen, drawing her arms about him, and feeling her flutter like a little bird, while the moonlight came in through the green leaves and fell in fanciful patterns on the floor.  “But I came to say—­you have had one happy day.  Wholly happy, have you not, poor little Bebee?”

“Ah, yes!” she sighed rather than said the answer in her wondrous gladness; drawn there close to him, with the softness of his lips upon her.  Could he have come back only to ask that?

“Well, that is something.  You will remember it always, Bebee?” he murmured in his unconscious cruelty.  “I did not wish to spoil your cloudless pleasure, dear—­for you care for me a little, do you not?—­so I came back to tell you only now, that I go away for a little while to-morrow.”

“Go away!”