t a minute I will show you the roses that I shall cut to-morrow the
first thing, and take down to St. Guido to Our Lady's altar in
thank-offering for to-day. I should like you to choose them--you
yourself--and if you would just touch them I should feel as if you gave
them to her too. Will you?"

She spoke with the pretty outspoken frankness of her habitual speech,
just tempered and broken with the happy, timid hesitation, the curious
sense at once of closer nearness and of greater distance, that had come
on her since he had kissed her among the bright beanflowers.

He turned from her quickly.

"No, dear, no. Gather your roses alone, Bebee; if I touch them their
leaves will fall."

Then, with a hurriedly backward glance down the dusky lane to see that
none were looking, he bent his head and kissed her again quickly and with
a sort of shame, and swung the gate behind him and went away through
the boughs and the shadows.

CHAPTER XIX.

Bebee looked after him wistfully till his figure was lost in the gloom.

The village was very quiet; a dog barking afar off and a cow lowing in
the meadow were the only living things that made their presence heard;
the pilgrims had not returned.

She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that indistinct, dreamy happiness
which is the prerogative of innocent love.

"How wonderful it is that he should give a thought to me!" she said again
and again to herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a little knot
of daisied grass to set it in his crown where the great diamonds should
be.

She did not reason. She did not question. She did not look beyond that
hour--such is the privilege of youth.

"How I will read! How I will learn! How wise I will try to be; and how
good, if I can!" she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under her
weight, and looking with glad eyes at the goats as they frisked with
their young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one
by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from the palace woods, and
the frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes.

Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil and
the need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latch
of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well to
draw its nightly draught for the dry garden.

"Oh, dear roses!" she said to them as she rained the silvery showers over
their nodding heads. "Oh, dear roses!--tell me--was