Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as a passion.  Bebee’s was so.  Like George Herbert’s serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt away from a floor without doing it to the service of her lord.

Only Bebee’s lord was a king of earth, made of earth’s dust and vanities.

But what did she know of that?

CHAPTER XXV.

The winter went by, and the snow-drops and crocus and pale hepatica smiled at her from the black clods.  Every other springtime Bebee had run with fleet feet under the budding trees down into the city, and had sold sweet little wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow was melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis.

“The winter is gone,” the townspeople used to say; “look, there is Bebee with the flowers.”

But this year they did not see the little figure itself like a rosy crocus standing against the brown timbers of the Maison de Roi.

Bebee had not heart to pluck a single blossom of them all.  She let them all live, and tended them so that the little garden should look its best and brightest to him when his hand should lift its latch.

Only he was so long coming—­so very long; the violets died away, and the first rosebuds came in their stead, and still Bebee looked every dawn and every nightfall vainly down the empty road.

Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness of waiting.

Pain they will bear, and privation they will pass through, fire and water and storm will not appall them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but waiting—­the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that drop one by one in their eternal sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly but surely, as the slow dropping of water frets away rock.

The summer came.

Nearly a year had gone by.  Bebee worked early and late.  The garden bloomed like one big rose, and the neighbors shook their heads to see the flowers blossom and fall without bringing in a single coin.

She herself spoke less seldom than ever; and now when old Jehan, who never had understood the evil thoughts of his neighbors, asked her what ailed her that she looked so pale and never stirred down to the city, now her courage failed her, and the tears brimmed over her eyes, and she could not call up a brave brief word to answer him.  For the time was so long, and she was so tired.

Still she never doubted that her lover would comeback:  he had said he would come:  she was as sure that he would come as she was sure that God came in the midst of the people when the silver bell rang and the Host was borne by on high.

Bebee did not heed much, but she vaguely-felt the isolation she was left in:  as a child too young to reason feels cold and feels hunger.

“No one wants me here now that Annemie is gone,” she thought to herself, as the sweet green spring days unfolded themselves one by one like the buds of the brier-rose hedges.