“My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did you ever seem to care for the things of the world.  I wish Jehan had not given you those silver buckles; I think they have set your little soul on vanities.”

“It is not the buckles; I am not covetous,” said Bebee; and then her face grew warm.  She did not know why. and she did not hear the rest of Father Francis’s admonitions.

CHAPTER XIII.

But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the next also, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bebee was quite happy if she saw him in the morning time, to give him a fresh rose, or at evening by the gates, or under the beech-trees, when he brought her a new book, and sauntered awhile up the green lane beside her.

An innocent, unconscious love like Bebee’s wants so little food to make it all content.  Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it.  Such slender stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright golden noon of perfect joy around it.

All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturer passion, are far away from it:  far as is the flash of the meteor across sultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the brown meadow brook.

It was very wonderful to Bebee that he, this stranger from Rubes’ fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time.  The days went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of the Brussels belfries; but only by such moments as brought her a word from his lips, or even a glimpse of him from afar, across the crowded square.

She sat up half the nights reading the books he gave her, studying the long cruel polysyllables, and spelling slowly through the phrases that seemed to her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were a pleasure to unravel forsake of the thought they held.

For Bebee, ignorant little simple soul that she was, had a mind in her that was eager, observant, quick to acquire, skilful to retain; and it would happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to her of the things which he gave to her to read, would think to himself that this child had more wisdom than was often to be found in schools.

Meanwhile he pondered various studies in various stages of a Gretchen, and made love to Bebee—­made love at least by his eyes and by his voice, not hurrying his pleasant task, but hovering about her softly, and mindful not to scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand over a poised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, a thought too quick, may scare away to safety.

Bebee knew where he lived in the street of Mary of Burgundy:  in an old palace that belonged to a great Flemish noble, who never dwelt there himself; but to ask anything about him—­why he was there? what his rank was? why he stayed in the city at all?—­was a sort of treason that never entered her thoughts.