It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen silence: that was all. She studied hard, and had got a quaint, strange, deep, scattered knowledge out of her old books; her face had lost all its roundness and color, but, instead, the forehead had gained breadth and the eyes had the dim fire of a student's.
Every night when she shut her volumes she thought,—
"I am a little nearer him. I know a little more."
Just so every morning, when she bathed her hands in the chilly water, she thought to herself, "I will make my skin as soft as I can for him, that it may be like the ladies' he has loved."
Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as a passion. Bébée's was so. Like George Herbert's serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt away from a floor without doing it to the service of her lord.
Only Bébée's lord was a king of earth, made of earth's dust and vanities.
But what did she know of that?
CHAPTER XXV.
The winter went by, and the snow-drops and crocus and pale hepatica smiled at her from the black clods. Every other springtime Bébée had run with fleet feet under the budding trees down into the city, and had sold sweet little wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow was melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis.
"The winter is gone," the townspeople used to say; "look, there is Bébée with the flowers."