But Bebee danced with the child, and did not hear.

Whose fete day had ever begun like this one of hers?

She was a little poet at heart, and should not have cared for such vanities; but when one is only sixteen, and has only a little rough woollen frock, and sits in the market place or the lace-room, with other girls around, how should one be altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step one took?

A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, that Bebee or her friends could spare at five o’clock on a summer morning, when the city was waiting for its eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and its butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to be off with his milk-cans.

So Bebee, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself, ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet along the grassy paths toward the city.

The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning, tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had served to shelter Antoine Maees from heat and rain through all the years of his life.

“Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blue eyes, Bebee,” people had said to her of late; but Bebee had shaken her head.

Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine’s feet, she would sit so long as she sold flowers in Brussels,—­here, underneath the shadow of the Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.

Old Antoine had never gone into the grand market that is fashioned after the Madeleine of Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling halls, all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal of Una, and large as the shield of the Red-Cross Knight.

Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse and stove.  He had always had his little stall among those which spread their tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms under the shadow of the Hotel de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings, the games and the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mountebank and the marriage parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.

Here Bebee, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him.  By nature she was as gay as a lark.  The people always heard her singing as they passed the garden.  The children never found their games so merry as when she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so much out there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the long, low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of hue and sunny in their fantasies.  Still, Bebee had one sad unsatisfied desire:  she wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.