wide Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat was
blowing and the barges dropping down the sluggish streams.

She was very footsore; very weary; very hungry so often; but she was in
France--in his country; and her spirit rose with the sense of that
nearness to him.

After all, God was so good to her; there were fine bright days and
nights; a few showers had fallen, but merely passing ones; the air was so
cool and so balmy that it served her almost as food; and she seldom found
people so unkind that they refused for her single little sou to give her
a crust of bread and let her lie in an outhouse.

After all, God was very good; and by the sixteenth or seventeenth day she
would be in the city of Paris.

She was a little light-headed at times from insufficient nourishment:
especially after waking from strange dreams in unfamiliar places;
sometimes the soil felt tremulous under her, and the sky spun round; but
she struggled against the feeling, and kept a brave heart, and tried to
be afraid of nothing.

Sometimes at night she thought she saw old Annemie. "But what if I do?"
she said to herself; "Annemie never will hurt me."

And now, as she grew nearer her goal, her natural buoyancy of spirit
returned as it had never done to her since the evening that he had kissed
and left her. As her body grew lighter and more exhausted, her fancy grew
keener and more dominant. All things of the earth and air spoke to her as
she went along as they had used to do. All that she had learned from the
books in the long cold months came to her clear and wonderful. She was
not so very ignorant now--ignorant, indeed, beside him--but still knowing
something that would make her able to read to him if he liked it, and to
understand if he talked of grave things.

She had no fixed thought of what she would be to him when she reached
him.

She fancied she would wait on him, and tend him, and make him well, and
be caressed by him, and get all gracious pretty things of leaf and
blossom about him, and kneel at his feet, and be quite happy if he only
touched her now and then with his lips;--her thoughts went no further
than that;--her love for him was of that intensity and absorption in
which nothing But itself is remembered.

When a creature loves much, even when it is as little and as simple a
soul as Bebee, the world and all its people and all its laws and ways are
as naught. They cease to exist; they are as though they had never been.

Wh