own back
to watch the light; her hands clasped still; and on her upturned face
the look that made the people say, "What does she see?--the angels or
the dead?"

She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries at home, and the children
even. She was looking upward at the stories of the painted panes; she
was listening to the message of the dying sun-rays; she was feeling
vaguely, wistfully, unutterably the tender beauty of the sacred place
and the awful wonder of the world in which she with her sixteen years
was all alone, like a little blue cornflower amongst the wheat that goes
for grist, and the barley that makes men drunk.

For she was alone, though she had so many friends. Quite alone
sometimes, for God had been cruel to her, and had made her a lark
without song.

* * *

He went leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse river, and across the
monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and musical
with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint old-world
villages.

There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, in
the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his life
in salt, sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull canal-water, mirroring
between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a
charm for him.

He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is
like a dull, quaint, gres de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set
inside its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and
barter, of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated
leaves of missal vellum, all gold and colour, and monkish story and
heroic ballad, that could only have been executed in the days when Art
was a religion.

* * *

"Oh--to-morrow perhaps, or next year--or when Fate fancies.

"Or rather--when I choose," he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest
with a certain pleasure on the little feet that went beside him in the
grass, and the pretty neck that showed ever and again, as the frills of
her linen bodice were blown back by the wind, and her own quick motion.

Bebee looked also up at him; he was very handsome, or seemed so to her,
after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Brabantois around
her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets,
he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep-brown waters, and a
face like one of Jorda