isy tells of to your sex."

"No?"

"No; the girls that you see count the flowers--they are thinking, not of
all the village, but of some one unlike all the rest, whose shadow falls
across theirs in the moonlight! You know that?"

"Ah, yes--and they marry afterwards--yes."

She said it softly, musingly, with no embarrassment; it was an unreal,
remote thing to her, and yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague
trouble that was infinitely sweet.

There is little talk of love in the lives of the poor; they have no space
for it; love to them means more mouths to feed, more wooden shoes to buy,
more hands to dive into the meagre bag of coppers. Now and then a girl
of the commune had been married, and had ploughing in the fields or to
her lace-weaving in the city. Bebee had thought little of it.

"They marry or they do not marry. That is as it may be," said Flamen,
with a smile. "Bebee, I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a
love-dial of the daisies. What is the story? Oh, I have told you stories
enough. Gretchen's you would not understand, just yet."

"But what did the daisies say to her?"

"My dear, the daisies always say the same thing, because daisies always
tell the truth and know men. The daisies always say 'a little'; it is the
girl's ear that tricks her, and makes her hear 'till death,'--a folly and
falsehood of which the daisy is not guilty."

"But who says it if the daisy does not?"

"Ah, the devil perhaps--who knows? He has so much to do in these things."

But Bebee did not smile; she had a look of horror in her blue eyes; she
belonged to a peasantry who believed in exorcising the fiend by the aid
of the cross, and who not so very many generations before had driven him
out of human bodies by rack and flame.

She looked with a little wistful fear on the white, golden-eyed
marguerites that lay on her lap.

"Do you think the fiend is in these?" she whispered, with awe in her
voice.

Flamen smiled. "When you count them he will be there, no doubt."

Bebee threw them with a shudder on the grass.

"Have I spoilt your holiday, dear?" he said, with a certain
self-reproach.

She was silent a minute, then she gathered up the daisies again, and
stroked them and put them to her lips.

"It is not they that do wrong. You say the girls' ears deceive them. It
is the girls who want a lie and will not believe a truth because it
humbles them; it is the girls that are to blame, not the daisies. As for