They had come to where the road goes up by the king's summer palace. They
were under great hanging beeches and limes. There was a high gray wall,
and over it the blossoming fruit boughs hung. In a ditch full of long
grass little kids bleated by their mothers. Away on the left went the
green fields of colza, and beetroot, and trefoil, with big forest trees
here and there in their midst, and, against the blue low line of the far
horizon, red mill-sails, and gray church spires; dreamy plaintive bells
far away somewhere were ringing the sad Flemish carillon.

He paused and looked at her.

"I must bid you good night, Bébée; you are near your home now."

She paused too and looked at him.

"But I shall see you to-morrow?"

There was the wistful, eager, anxious unconsciousness of appeal as when
the night before she had asked him if he were angry.

He hesitated a moment. If he said no, and went away out of the city
wherever his listless and changeful whim called him, he knew how it would
be with her; he knew what her life would be as surely as he knew the
peach would come out of the peach-flower rosy on the wall there: life in
the little hut; among the neighbors; sleepy and safe and soulless;--if he
let her alone.

If he stayed and saw her on the morrow he knew, too, the end as surely as
he knew that the branch of white pear-blossom, which in carelessness he