"

Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in which she was wrapping
gentians: it was a piece of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it
there was a single line or so which said that the artist Flamen, whose
Gretchen was the wonder of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in
his rooms in Paris.

Bebee stood and read; the strong ruddy western light upon the type, the
taunting laughter of the fruit girl on her ear.

A bitter shriek rang from her that made even the cruelty of Lisa's mirth
stop in a sudden terror.

She stood staring like a thing changed to stone down on the one name that
to her rilled all the universe.

"Ill--he is ill--do you hear?" she echoed piteously, looking at Lisa;
"and you say he is poor?"

"Poor? for sure! is he not a painter?" said the fruit girl, roughly. She
judged by her own penniless student lads; and she was angered with
herself for feeling sorrow for this little silly thing that she had loved
to torture.

"You have been bad and base to me; but now--I bless you, I love you, I
will pray for you," said Bebee, in a swift broken breath, and with a look
upon her face that startled into pain her callous enemy.

Then without another word, she thrust the paper in her bosom, and ran out
of the square breathless with haste and with a great resolve.

He was ill--and he was poor! The brave little soul of her leaped at once
to action. He was sick, and far away; and poor they said. All danger and
all difficulty faded to nothing before the vision of his need.

Bebee was only a little foundling who ran about in wooden shoes; but she
had the "dog's soul" in her--the soul that will follow faithfully though
to receive a curse, that will defend loyally though to meet a blow, and
that will die mutely loving to the last.

She went home, how she never knew; and without the delay of a moment
packed up a change of linen, and fed the fowls and took the key of the
hut down to old Jehan's cabin. The old man was only half-witted by reason
of his affliction for his dead daughter, but he was shrewd enough to
understand what she wanted of him, and honest enough to do it.

"I am going into the city," she said to him: "and if I am not back
to-night, will you feed the starling and the hens, and water the flowers
for me?"

Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice: it was seven in the evening,
and he was going to bed.

"What are you after, little one?" he asked: going to show the fine
buckles at a st