is not these kind of things I want--I want to know all
about the people who lived before us; I want to know what the stars are,
and what the wind is; I want to know where the lark goes when you lose
him out of sight against the sun; I want to know how the old artists got
to see God, that they could paint him and all his angels as they have
done; I want to know how the voices got into the bells, and how they can
make one's heart beat, hanging up there as they do, all alone among the
jackdaws; I want to know what it is when I walk in the fields in the
morning, and it is all gray and soft and still, and the corn-crake cries
in the wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes, that makes
me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I were so very near God, and yet
so all alone, and such a little thing; because you see the mouse she
has her hole, and the crake her own people, but I--"

Her voice faltered a little and stopped: she had never before thought out
into words her own loneliness; from the long green arbor the voices of
the girls and the students sang,--

"Ah! le doux son d'un baiser tendre!"

Flamen was silent. The poet in him--and in an artist there is always more
or less of the poet--kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to pity
and respect.

They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had little wisdom in them, and
were quite childish in their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously
as a man very base and callous may at times be moved by the look in a
dying deer's eyes, or by the sound of a song that some lost love once
sang.

He rose and drew her hands away, and took her small face between his own
hands instead.

"Poor little Bebee!" he said gently, looking down on her with a breath
that was almost a sigh. "Poor little Bebee!--to envy the corncrake and
the mouse!"

She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very warm under his touch, but
her eyes looked still into his without fear.

He stooped and touched her forehead with his lips, gently and
without passion, almost reverently; she grew rose-hued as the bright
bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled a
little and drew back, but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed; she was
too simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of passion and of
consciousness.

It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who was fifteen years old and
sold milk for the Krebs people in the villages with a little green cart
and a yellow dog-