"I have very little, you know," she added, wistfully. "Only goat's milk
and bread; but if that will do--and there is some honey--and if you would
eat a salad, I would cut one fresh."

He did enter, and glanced round him with a curious pity and wonder both
in one.

It was such a little, small, square place; and its floor was of beaten
clay; and its unceiled roof he could have touched; and its absolute
poverty was so plain,--and yet the child looked so happy in it, and was
so like a flower, and was so dainty and fresh, and even so full of grace.

She stood and looked at him with frank and grateful eyes; she could
hardly believe that he was here; he, the stranger of Rubes' land, in her
own little rush-covered home.

But she was not embarrassed by it; she was glad and proud.

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings,--the dignity that
comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had
this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity
of childhood with her still.

Some women have it still when they are four-score.

She could have looked at him forever, she was so happy; she cared
nothing now for those dazzling dahlias--he had left them; he was actually
here--here in her own, little dear home, with the cocks looking in at the
threshold, and the sweet-peas nodding at the lattice, and the starling
crying, "Bonjour! Bonjour!"