Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil and
the need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latch
of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well to
draw its nightly draught for the dry garden.
"Oh, dear roses!" she said to them as she rained the silvery showers over
their nodding heads. "Oh, dear roses!--tell me--was ever anybody so happy
as I am? Oh, if you say 'yes' I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers
that were only born yesterday!"
But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as she
wished them to say,--
"No--no one--ever before, Bebee--no one ever before."
For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heart
puts into them.
An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and aged
to make one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving form,
grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced on
her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden.
"You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little one!" he said across the
sweetbrier hedge.
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