ever anybody so happy
as I am? Oh, if you say 'yes' I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers
that were only born yesterday!"

But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as she
wished them to say,--

"No--no one--ever before, Bebee--no one ever before."

For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heart
puts into them.

An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and aged
to make one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving form,
grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced on
her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden.

"You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little one!" he said across the
sweetbrier hedge. "Nay, that was too bad; work, work, work--thy pretty
back should not be bent double yet. You want a holiday, Bebee; well,
the Fete Dieu is near. Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a few
sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds. You sit dull in the market all
day; you want a feast."

Bebee colored behind the hedge, and ran in and brought three new-laid
eggs that she had left in the flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust
them on him through a break in the brier. It was the first time she had
ever done anything of which she might not speak: she was ashamed, and yet
the secret was so sweet to her.

"I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!" she murmured, with a tremulous
breath and a shine in her eyes that the old man's ears and sight were too
dull to discern.

"So was _she_" muttered Jehan, as he thrust the eggs into his old
patched blue blouse,--"so was she. And then a stumble--a blow in the lane
there--a horse's kick--and all was over. All over, my pretty one--for
ever and ever."

CHAPTER XX.

On a sudden impulse Flamen, going through the woodland shadows to the
city, paused and turned back; all his impulses were quick and swayed him
now hither, now thither, in many contrary ways.

He knew that the hour was come--that he must leave her and spare her, as
to himself he phrased it, or teach her the love words that the daisies
whisper to women.

And why not?--anyway she would marry Jeannot.

He, half-way to the town, walked back again and paused a moment at the
gate; an emotion half pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him.

Anyway he would leave her in a few days: Paris had again opened her arms
to him; his old life awaited him; women who claimed him by imperious,
amorous d