rony, "Lo!
your God is Love."

This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
no harbour of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn to the use of the great
cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.

Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm grey
morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
And she would look back often, often, as she went; and when all was lost
in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire which she still saw
through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."

But none such ever did come back.

They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
which the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
the next morning, withered and dead.

One amongst the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of
whom the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through
the lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller
of Ypres.

* * *

"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
other?"

There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.

* * *

Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all
that other men hol