It was just sunset. There was a golden glow on the little bit of water.
On the other side of the garden some one was playing a guitar. Under a
lime-tree some girls were swinging, crying, Higher! higher! at each toss.
In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long table, there was a noisy
party of students and girls of the city; their laughter was mellowed by
distance as it came over the breadth of the garden, and they sang, with
fresh shrill Flemish voices, songs from an opera bouffe of La Monnaie.
It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.
There was everywhere about an air of light-hearted enjoyment. Bebee sat
with a wondering look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the natural
instincts of her youth, that were like curled-up fruit buds in her,
unclosed softly to the light of joy.
"Is life always like this in your Rubes' land?" she asked him; that vague
far-away country of which she never asked him anything more definite, and
which yet was so clear before her fancy.
"Yes," he made answer to her. "Only--instead of those leaves, flowers and
pomegranates; and in lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes
are esteemed like king's jewels; and in place of those little green
arbors, great white palaces, cool and still, with ilex woods and orange
groves and sapphire seas beyond them.
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