ood between her and
where she would go.

"You think me vain," she cried, "but, indeed, with me this is no girlish
fancy, mother. Men greater and wiser than I have told me that mine will
be work for which the world will be the better."

"I think that they have spoken truly, my child," said the Bee-woman,
"and that is why I was waiting for you."

"Then let me go and work!" she cried, and rose from her knees.

"Go quickly, indeed," said the Bee-woman, "but work with flesh and
blood, as does God the Creator, not with paint and canvas, as does man,
the mimic!"

Then this old bee woman grew tall and terrible to her, and she saw that
she had been led into the wood as into a trap and that she must fight
hard for her freedom.

"I do not know what you are!" she cried wildly, "but you talk like an
old song mumbled over the hearthstone, and it is to the hearthstone that
you would chain me. Was I given eyes that can sweep the horizon only to
turn them downward to that narrow hearth?"

"My child," said the old woman, and her voice was like a bell that tolls
across the ancient fields, "so long as bees hive and fire burns on the
hearths of men will the daughters of men walk in this wood and tell me
that the hearth is narrow; and yet it is wider than the width of the
womb whence all men come, and wider than the width of the grave whither
all men go. And all men know this."

She put her hand over her heart, as one who covers a wound, and her hand
touched a folded paper under her gray gown. She drew it out in triumph
and her face grew bright.

"Not all men, mother, not all men!" she boasted. "See--I took this with
me when I went in to the trial from which I escaped. (Though what I have
suffered in this wood is worse than that from which I ran away.) Read
this letter from my husband, and you will see that not all men would
chain their mates--that to-day the jailer himself throws away the key!"

"Read me the letter," said the Bee-woman. And she read:

"_I love you because you think my thoughts with me, because our work is
the same and we understand each other. Let us work on together hand in
hand._"

"Now dip this letter in the spring," said the Bee-woman, "and read it to
me again. For now the paper can show you only what the pen has written."

Wondering, she dipped it in the spring, and the writing, which had been
black, turned blood red and was not the same when she read it:

"_I love you because your eyes are blue and ha