Nor even in friendship, for he had rashly spoken rough words against the stranger from Rubes’ land, and Bebee ever since then had passed him by with a grave, simple greeting, and when he had brought her in timid gifts a barrow-load of fagots, had thanked him, but had bidden him take the wood home to his mother.

“You think evil things of me, Bebee?” good Jeannot had pleaded, with a sob in his voice; and she had answered gently,—­

“No; but do not speak to me, that is all.”

Then he had cursed her absent lover, and Bebee gone within and closed her door.

She had no idea that the people thought ill of her.  They were cold to her, and such coldness made her heart ache a little more.  But the one great love in her possessed her so strongly that all other things were half unreal.

She did her daily housework from sheer habit, and she studied because he had told her to do it, and because with the sweet, stubborn, credulous faith of her youth, she never doubted that he would return.

Otherwise there was no perception of real life in her; she dreamed and prayed, and prayed and dreamed, and never ceased to do either one or the other, even when she was scattering potato-peels to the fowls, or shaking carrots loose of the soil, or sweeping the snow from her hut door, or going out in the raw dark dawn as the single little sad bell of St. Guido tolled through the stillness for the first mass.

For though even Father Francis looked angered at her because he thought she was stubborn, and hid some truth and some shame from him at confession, yet she went resolutely and oftener than ever to kneel in the dusty, dusky, crumbling old church, for it was all she could do for him who was absent—­so she thought—­and she did not feel quite so far away from him when she was beseeching Christ to have care of his soul and of his body.

All her pretty dreams were dead.

She never heard any story in the robin’s song, or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, or fancied that angels came about her in the night—­never now.

The fields were gray and sad; the birds were little brown things; the stars were cold and far off; the people she had used to care for were like mere shadows that went by her meaningless and without interest, and all she thought of was the one step that never came:  all she wanted was the one touch she never felt.

“You have done wrong, Bebee, and you will not own it,” said the few neighbors who ever spoke to her.

Bebee looked at them with wistful, uncomprehending eyes.

“I have done no wrong,” she said gently, but no one believed her.

A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale and thin for nothing, so they reasoned.  She might have sinned as she had liked if she had been sensible after it, and married Jeannot.

But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem as though she had done nothing,—­that was guilt indeed.