Bebee," said Franz, the
biggest boy.

"Perhaps not," said Bebee; "but one cannot be everything, you know,
Franz."

"But surely you would rather be merry than anything else?"

"I think there is something better, Franz. I am not sure; I want to find
out; I will tell you when I know."

"Who has put that into your head, Bebee?"

"The angels in the Cathedral," she told them, and the children were awed
and left her, and went away to play blindman's buff by themselves on the
grass by the swan's water.

"But for all that the angels have said it," said Franz to his sisters,
"I cannot see what good it will be to her to be wise, if she will not
care any longer afterwards for almond gingerbread and currant cake."

* * *

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

* * *

"Ay dear; when the frost kills your brave rosebush, root and bud, do you
think of the thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair sweet-smelling
things that flowered all your summer?"

* * *

Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds, and the
butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age; the only
perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine,
useless, say they who are wiser than God.

* * *

When the day was done, Bebee gave a quick sigh as she looked across the
square. She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful, and
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbriar, and a tiny
spray of maiden-hair fern that grew under the willows, which she had
kept covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.

No one would have it now.

The child went out of the place sadly, as the carillon rang. There was
only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that
had been given her for her dinner.

She went along the twisting, many-coloured, quaintly-fashioned streets,
till she came to the water-side.

It is very ancient, there still; there are all manner of old buildings,
black and brown and grey, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors,
crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface
of the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle,
and timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and
go with all the year round, to and from the Zuyder Zee, and the Baltic
water, and the wild Northumbrian s