And some of them will be sure to have drunk too much, and the children will get so cross.
Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, 'Do not mix up prayer and play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey'; but I do not know why he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough--sweeter than anything, I think.

When I pray to the Virgin to let me see you next day, I go to bed quite happy, because she will do it, I know, if it will be good for me." "But if it were not good for you, Bebee?
Would you cease to wish it then ?" He rose as he spoke, and went across the floor and drew away her hand that was parting the flax, and took it in his own and stroked it, indulgently and carelessly, as a man may stroke the soft fur of a young cat.
Leaning against the little lattice and looking down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half serious, half amorous, half sad, Bebee looked up with a sudden and delicious terror that ran through her as the charm of the snake's gaze runs through the bewildered bird.
"Would you cease to wish it if it were not good ?" he asked again.
Bebee's face grew pale and troubled.

She left her hand in his because she did not think any shame of his taking it.

But the question suddenly flung the perplexity and darkness of doubt into the clearness of her pure child's conscience.

All her ways had been straight and sunlit before her.
She had never had a divided duty.
The religion and the pleasure of her simple little life had always gone hand-in-hand, greeting one another, and never for an instant in conflict.
In any hesitation of her own she had always gone to Father Francis, and he had disentangled the web for her and made all plain.
But here was a difficulty in which she could never go to Father Francis.
Right and wrong, duty and desire, were for the first time arrayed before her in their ghastly and unending warfare.
It frightened her with a certain breathless sense of peril--the peril of a time when in lieu of that gentle Mother of Roses whom she kneeled to among the flowers, she would only see a dusky shadow looming between her and the beauty of life and the light of the sun.
What he said was quite vague to her.