She did not know what ailed her.

She went to bed without supper, leaving her bit of bread and bowl of
goat's milk to make a meal for the fowls in the morning.

"Little ugly, shameful, naked feet!" she said to them, sitting on the
edge of her mattress, and looking at them in the moonlight. They were
very pretty feet, and would not have been half so pretty in silk hose and
satin shoon; but she did not know that: he had told her she wanted those
vanities.

She sat still a long while, her rosy feet swaying to and fro like two
roses that grow on one stalk and hang down in the wind. The little
lattice was open; the sweet and dusky garden was beyond; there was a
hand's breadth of sky, in which a single star was shining; the leaves
of the vine hid all the rest.

But for once she saw none of it.

She only saw the black Broodhuis; the red and gold sunset overhead; the
gray stones, with the fallen rose leaves and crushed fruits; and in the
shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, that looked at hers.

Had she been ungrateful?

The little tender, honest heart of her was troubled and oppressed. For
once, that night she slept ill.

CHAPTER VI.

All the next day she sat under the yellow awning, but she sat alone.

It was market day; there were many strangers. Flowers were in demand. The
copper pieces were ringing against one another all the hours through in
her leathern bag. The cobbler was in such good humor that he forgot to
quarrel with his wife. The fruit was in such plenty that they gave her a
leaf-full of white and red currants for her noonday dinner. And the
people split their sides at the Cheap John's jokes; he was so droll. No
one saw the leaks in his kettles or the hole in his bellows, or the leg
that was lacking to his milking stool.

Everybody was gay and merry that day. But Bebee's eyes looked wistfully
over the throng, and did not find what they sought. Somehow the day
seemed dull, and the square empty.

The stones and the timbers around seemed more than ever full of a
thousand stories that they would not tell her because she knew nothing,
and was only Bebee.

She had never known a dull hour before. She, a little bright,
industrious, gay thing, whose hands were always full of work, and whose
head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when
she wove the lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with the frost on the
casements, and the mice running out in their hunger over the bare br