was in the strange, noisy, cruel city, with' the river
close to her, and all her dead dreams drifting down it like murdered
children, whilst that woman kissed him.

She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose and stood upright. There
was a door open to the moonlight--the door where she had sat spinning and
singing in a thousand happy days; the lavender blew; the tall, unbudded
green lilies swayed in the wind; she looked at them, and knew none of
them.

The night air drifted through her linen dress, and played on her bare
arms, and lifted the curls of her hair; the same air that had played
with her so many times out of mind when she had been a little tottering
thing that measured its height by the red rosebush. But it brought her no
sense of where she was.

All she saw was the woman who kissed him.

There was the water beyond; the kindly calm water, all green with the
moss and the nests of the ouzels and the boughs of the hazels and
willows, where the swans were asleep in the reeds, and the broad lilies
spread wide and cool.

But she did not see any memory in it. She thought it was the cruel gray
river in the strange white city: and she cried to it; and went out
into the old familiar ways, and knew none of them; and ran feebly yet
fleetly through the bushes and flowers, looking up once at the stars with
a helpless broken blind look, like a thing that is dying.

"He does not want me!" she said to them; "he does not want me!--other
women kiss him there!"

Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird's when its wings are shot,
and yet it tries to rise, she hovered a moment over the water, and
stretched her arms out to it.

"He does not want me!" she murmured; "he does not want me--and I am so
tired. Dear God!"

Then she crept down, as a weary child creeps to its mother, and threw
herself forward, and let the green dark waters take her where they
had found her amidst the lilies, a little laughing yearling thing.

There she soon lay, quite quiet, with her face turned to the stars, and
the starling poised above to watch her as she slept.

She had been only Bebee: the ways of God and man had been too hard for
her.

When the messengers of Flamen came that day, they took him back a dead
moss-rose and a pair of little wooden shoes worn through with walking.

"One creature loved me once," he says to women who wonder why the wooden
shoes are there.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEBEE***

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