Bebee listened and looked; then kissed the old shaking hand and took up
the lace patterns and went softly out of the room without speaking.

When old Annemie watched at the window it was useless to seek for any
word or sign of her: people said that she had never been quite right in
her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years before, when the
coaster had brought into port the broken beam of the good brig "Fleur
d'Epine."

Bebee did not know about that, nor heed whether her wits were right or
not.

She had known the old creature in the lace-room where Annemie pricked out
designs, and she had conceived a great regard and sorrow for her; and
when Annemie had become too ailing and aged to go herself any longer to
the lace-maker's place, Bebee had begged leave for her to have the
patterns at home, and had carried them to and fro for her for the last
three or four years, doing many other little useful services for the lone
old soul as well,--services which Annemie hardly perceived, she had
grown so used to them, and her feeble intelligence was so sunk in the one
absorbing idea that she must watch all the days through and all the years
through for the coming of the dead man and the lost brig.

Bebee put the lace patterns in her basket, and trotted home, her sabots
clattering on the stones.

"What it must be to care for any one like that!" she thought, and by some
vague association of thought that she could not have pursued, she lifted
the leaves and looked at the moss-rosebud.

It was quite dead.

CHAPTER VII.

As she got clear of the city and out on her country road, a shadow Fell
across her in the evening light.

"Have you had a good day, little one?" asked a voice that made her stop
with a curious vague expectancy and pleasure.

"It is you!" she said, with a little cry, as she saw her friend of the
silk stockings leaning on a gate midway in the green and solitary road
that leads to Laeken.

"Yes, it is I," he answered, as he joined her. "Have you forgiven me,
Bebee?"

She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes, like those of a child in
fault.

"Oh, I did not sleep all night!" she said, simply. "I thought I had been
rude and ungrateful, and I could not be sure I had done right, though to
have done otherwise would certainly have been wrong."

He laughed.

"Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to be drawn from most moral
uncertainties. Do not think twice about the matter, my dear. I