d tapped at the lattice. The shrill voice of Reine, the
sabot-maker's wife, broken with anguish, called through the hanging
ivy,--

"Bebee, you are a wicked one, they say, but the only one there is at home
in the village this day. Get you to town for the love of Heaven, and send
Doctor Max hither, for my pet, my flower, my child lies dying, and not a
soul near, and she black as a coal with choking--go, go, go!--and Mary
will forgive you your sins. Save the little one, dear Bebee, do you hear?
and I will pray God and speak fair the neighbors for you. Go!"

Bebee rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar sound of a human voice, and
looked at the breathless mother with eyes of pitying wonder.

"Surely I will go," she said, gently; "but there is no need to bribe me.
I have not sinned greatly--that I know."

Then she went out quickly and ran through the lanes and into the city for
the sick child, and found the wise man, and sent him, and did the errand
rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic instinct than in any reasoning
consciousness of doing good.

When she was moving through the once familiar and happy ways as the sun
was setting on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes were
ringing from the many towers, a strange sense of unreality, of
non-existence, fell upon her.

Could it be she?--she indeed--who had gone there the year before the
gladdest thing that the earth bore, with no care except to shelter her
flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest blossoms for the
burgomaster's housewife?

She did not think thus to herself; but a vague doubt that she could ever
have been the little gay, laborious, happy Bebee, with troops of friends
and endless joys for every day that dawned, came over her as she went by
the black front of the Broodhuis.

The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit girl, jarred on her as she passed the
stall under its yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening
wind.

"Oh he, little fool," the mocking voice cried, "the rind of the fine pine
is full of prickles, and stings the lips when the taste is gone?--to be
sure--crack common nuts like me and you are never wanting--hazels grow
free in every copse. Prut, tut! your grand lover lies a-dying; so the
students read out of this just now; and you such a simpleton as not to
get a roll of napoleons out of him before he went to rot in Paris. I dare
say he was poor as sparrows, if one knew the truth. He was only a
painter after all.