Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she was quite content.

Besides, she knew all the people:  the old cobbler, who sat next her, and chattered all day long like a magpie; the tinker, who had come up many a summer night to drink a-glass with Antoine; the Cheap John, who cheated everybody else, but who had always given her a toy or a trinket at every Fete Dieu all the summers she had known; the little old woman, sour as a crab, who sold rosaries and pictures of saints, and little waxen Christs upon a tray; the big dogs who pulled the carts in, and lay panting all day under the rush-bottomed chairs on which the egg-wives and the fruit sellers sat, and knitted, and chaffered; nay, even the gorgeous huissier and the frowning gendarme, who marshalled the folks into order as they went up for municipal registries, or for town misdemeanors,—­she knew them all; had known them all ever since she had first trotted in like a little dog at Antoine’s heels.

So Bebee stayed there.

It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in all Northern Europe, with its black timbers, and gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, and majestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles.  That Bebee did not know, but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis, selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noonday like any other market girl, but at times glancing up to the stately towers and the blue sky, with a look on her face that made the old tinker and cobbler whisper together, “What does she see there?—­the dead people or the angels?”

The truth was that even Bebee herself did not know very surely what she saw—­something that was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowd that loved her.  That was all she could have said had anybody asked her.

But none did.

No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and for the angels, the tinker and the cobbler were of opinion that one had only too much of them sculptured about everywhere, and shining on all the casements—­in reverence be it spoken, of course.

CHAPTER III.

“I remembered it was your name-day, child Here are half a dozen eggs,” said one of the hen wives; and the little cross woman with the pedler’s tray added a waxen St. Agnes, colored red and yellow to the very life no doubt; and the old Cheap John had saved her a cage for the starling; and the tinker had a cream cheese for her in a vine-leaf, and the sweetmeat seller brought her a beautiful gilded horn of sugarplums, and the cobbler had made her actually a pair of shoes—­red shoes, beautiful shoes to go to mass in and be a wonder in to all the neighborhood.  And they thronged round her, and adored the silver waist buckles; and when Bebee got fairly to her stall, and traffic began, she thought once more that nobody’s feast day had ever dawned like hers.