best blossoms for her, and tries to be good, and never
tells a lie," thought Bebee, "I am quite sure, as she loves the lilies,
that she will never altogether forget me."

So she said to the Mother of Christ fearlessly, and nothing doubting; and
then rose for her daily work of cutting the flowers for the market in
Brussels.

By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed, her goat foddered, her
starling's cage cleaned, her hut door locked, and her wooden shoes
clattering on the sunny road into the city, Bebee was almost content
again, though ever and again, as she trod the familiar ways, the tears
dimmed her eyes as she remembered that old Antoine would never again
hobble over the stones beside her.

"You are a little wilful one, and too young to live alone," said Father
Francis, meeting her in the lane.

But he did not scold her seriously, and she kept to her resolve; and the
women, who were good at heart, took her back into favor again; and so
Bebee had her own way, and the fairies, or the saints, or both together,
took care of her; and so it came to pass that all alone she heard the
cock crow whilst it was dark, and woke to the grand and amazing truth
that this warm, fragrant, dusky June morning found her full sixteen years
old.

CHAPTER II.

The two years had not been all playtime any more than they had been all
summer.

When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends
have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor
its crusts very many at any time.

Bebee had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's eyes, and a poet's thoughts
sometimes in her own untaught and unconscious fashion.

But all the same she was a little hard-working Brabant peasant girl;
up whilst the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sun
sank beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, and
watered, and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean as
a fresh-blossomed primrose; she milked her goat and swept her floor; she
sat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in the
winter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sight
over lace-making in the city to get the small bit of food that stood
between her and that hunger which to the poor means death.

A hard life; very hard when hail and snow made the streets of Brussels
like slopes of ice; a little hard even in the gay summer time when she
sat under the awning fronting