er so dazzling, so wondrously, so superhumanly
beautiful; they seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, rose and
purple and gold, that outblazed the sun on the south border of her little
garden, and blanched all the soft color out of the homely roses, and
pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and double-stocks, that had bloomed
there ever since the days of Waterloo.

But the dahlias had no scent; and Bebee wondered if these women had any
heart in them,--they looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity. To the
child, whose dreams of womanhood were evolved from the face of the Mary
of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel in the
blue coif whose face has a light as of the sun,--to her who had dreamed
her way into vague perceptions of her own sex's maidenhood and maternity
by help of those great pictures which had been before her sight from
infancy, there was some taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness
in these jewelled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but she
felt it, as she felt that the grand dahlias missed a flower's divinity,
being scentless.

She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; hardy, fragrant, clean,
tender, flowering by the wayside, full of honey, though only nourished
on the turf and the stones, these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright,
scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dim sense of pain and shame.

Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to Father Francis:--

"I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied them; and I could not pray to
Mary last night for thinking of them, for I hated them so much."

But she did not say,--

"I hated them because they were with him."

Out of the purest little soul, Love entering drives forth Candor.

"That is not like you at all, Bebee," said the good old man, as she knelt
at his feet on the bricks of his little bare study, where all the books
he ever spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping.

"My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did you ever seem to care
for the things of the world. I wish Jehan had not given you those silver
buckles; I think they have set your little soul on vanities."

"It is not the buckles; I am not covetous," said Bebee; and then her face
grew warm. She did not know why. and she did not hear the rest of Father
Francis's admonitions.

CHAPTER XIII.

But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the next
also, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bebee wa