“Only see, Bebee!  Such a grand cake!” they shouted, dancing down the lane.  “Jules picked the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, and Christine took the ribbon off her own communion cap, all for you—­all for you; but you will let us come and eat it too?”

Old Gran’mere Bishot, who was the oldest woman about Laeken, hobbled through the grass on her crutches and nodded her white shaking head, and smiled at Bebee.

“I have nothing to give you, little one, except my blessing, if you care for that.”

Bebee ran out, breaking from the children, and knelt down in the wet grass, and bent her pretty sunny head to the benediction.

Trine, the miller’s wife, the richest woman of them all, called to the child from the steps of the mill,—­’

“A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, Bebee!  Come up, and here is my first dish of cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they will make you a feast with Varnhart’s cake, though she should have known better, so poor as she is.  Charity begins at home, and these children’s stomachs are empty.”

Bebee ran up and then down again gleefully, with her lapful of big black cherries; Tambour, the old white dog, who had used to drag her about in his milk cart, leaping on her in sympathy and congratulation.

“What a supper we will have!” she cried to the charcoal-burner’s children, who were turning somersaults in the dock leaves, while the swans stared and hissed.

When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have a flavor of Paradise still, especially when they are tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the year.

An old man called to her as she went by his door.  All these little cabins lie close together, with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or their hedges of thorn between them; you may ride by and never notice them if you do not look for them under the leaves closely, as you would for thrushes’ nests.

He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine’s; he had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza and the corn.

“Come in, my pretty one, for a second,” he whispered, with an air of mystery that made Bebee’s heart quicken with expectancy.  “Come in; I have something for you.  They were my dead daughter’s—­you have heard me talk of her—­Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they say; for me I think it was yesterday.  Mere Krebs—­she is a hard woman—­heard me talking of my girl.  She burst out laughing, ’Lord’s sake, fool, why, your girl would be sixty now an she had lived.’  Well, so it may be; you see, the new mill was put up the week she died, and you call the new mill old; but, my girl, she is young to me.  Always young.  Come here, Bebee.”

Bebee went after him a little awed, into the dusky interior, that smelt of stored apples and of dried herbs that hung from the roof.  There was a walnut-wood press, such as the peasants of France and the low countries keep their homespun linen in and their old lace that serves for the nuptials and baptisms of half a score of generations.