He stooped and touched her forehead with his lips, gently and without passion, almost reverently; she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled a little and drew back, but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed; she was too simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of passion and of consciousness.
It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs people in the villages with a little green cart and a yellow dog—no more.
And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse of the blue sky swam round her indistinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear and were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because of the great sudden unintelligible happiness that seemed to bear her little life away on it as a sea wave bears a young child off its feet.
"You do not feel alone now, Bébée?" he whispered to her.
"No!" she answered him softly under her breath, and sat still, while all her body quivered like a leaf.
No; how could she ever be alone now that this sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always be in memory upon her; how could she wish ever again now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or the gray mouse in the hedge of hawthorn?
At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.
"It is time to go home, Bébée," said Flamen.
CHAPTER XVIII.
So it came to pass that Bébée's day in the big forest came and went as simply almost as any day that she had played away with the Varnhart children under the beech shadows of Cambre woods.