the Maison du Roi; but all the time the
child throve on it, and was happy, and dreamed of many graceful and
gracious things whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing the
threads to and fro on her lace pillow.

Now--when she woke to the full sense of her wonderful sixteen
years--Bebee, standing barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sight
as was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine.

The sun had only left a soft warmth like an apricot's on her white skin.
Her limbs, though strong as a mountain pony's, were slender and well
shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled masses, and tumbled about her
shoulders. Her pretty round plump little breast was white as the lilies
in the grass without, and in this blooming time of her little life,
Bebee, in her way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is beautiful, and her
innocent, courageous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath their
laughter, dreams that went farther than the green woods of Laeken,
farther even than the white clouds of summer.

She could not move among them idly as poets and girls love to do; she had
to be active amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail, and
blight and frost, would have made havoc of their fairest hopes.

The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled
by all burdens; but perhaps the strongest love is that which, whilst it
adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat, for the
thing beloved.

So Bebee dreamed in her garden; but all the time for sake of it hoed and
dug, and hurt her hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed her shoulders
under the great metal pails from the well.

This wondrous morning, with the bright burden of her sixteen years upon
her, she dressed herself quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as a bird,
went to sit on her little wooden stool in the doorway.

There had been fresh rain in the night: the garden was radiant; the smell
of the wet earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in
palaces.

The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair as she went out; the
starling called to her, "Bebee, Bebee--bonjour, bonjour." These were all
the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But
to Bebee it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she was
sixteen years old that day.

Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in the dawn and thought,
without knowing that she thought it, "How good it is to live when one
is young!"