Saggia wanted to be angry with her, but the sight of Nuova, so sad and forlorn-looking, and with tear-marks still on her face, was too much for her kind heart. And she really loved Nuova very much. Indeed, all that Nuova had done, and what she had said, had made a strange appeal to the wise old bee. She was almost frightened sometimes to feel that down deep in her heart she not only sympathized with much of Nuova's revolt against the rigid traditions and automatic life of the bees, but that she realized that this stifling of all independent action and all personal emotions was not always the way to the highest happiness nor even the wisest conduct for the bees. She shuddered to think that perhaps she, too, was a "new bee." Nuova was half-frightened by Saggia's discovery of her and by her hard words. But she answered her willfully and defiantly, although with a touch of attractive mischievousness. "Nobody sent me out," she said. "I have just decided to be a forager; that's all. While I was in the hive a little while ago a forager came in with two great loads of pollen in her pollen baskets. She was very tired and seemed sick. While she was looking around for an empty cell in which to put her pollen, she suddenly sank down--and--and died." Nuova shivered as she said this, and dropped her antennæ down over her eyes for a moment. "Ah, yes," said Saggia sadly but proudly; "worked herself to death. That is the noble death we have. We die in the harness--working for others, working for the hive. The bees know that death well and honor it." "They may know it well," broke in Nuova sharply, "but they do not honor it well. Anyway, not by their actions. Nobody paid any attention to the poor forager when she was staggering along with her load, and none when she sank down on the floor and died. Except pretty soon a couple of cleaners came along and dragged her body away. I suppose they brought it out here and flung it off the platform somewhere. A noble death, well honored, indeed! Well, I don't want that kind. I am going to die out in the garden, under a flower." While Nuova was speaking, Beffa had hopped and hummed his way over to them, and now he broke in with a song, which he sang as he hopped and danced about them. This is what he sang: "Work, no play; work all day; A useful life; a usual life; The good bee's way, All day, all day. Then die and lie Till Saggia spy The carrion stuff-- A tug; a shove, And the friend you love Is gone to grass: Ha, ha, alas, is gone to grass. A noble life; a halted breath: The epitaph: 'She worked to death.'" Both Saggia and Nuova listened to Beffa and watched him till he had finished singing. They both saw clearly his own unhappiness and his own revolt against the rigor of the bee tradition that demands always the full sacrifice of the individual for the community. Saggia realized that Beffa, too, was a "new bee."