“But how will you wear shoes without stockings?”

It was a snake cast into her Eden.

She had never thought of it.

“Perhaps I can save money and buy some,” she answered after a sad little pause.  “But that I could not do till next year.  They would cost several francs, I suppose.”

“Unless a good fairy gives them to you?”

Bebee smiled; fairies were real things to her—­relations indeed.  She did not imagine that he spoke in jest.

“Sometimes I pray very much and things come,” she said softly.  “When the Gloire de Dijon was cut back too soon one summer, and never blossomed, and we all thought it was dead, I prayed all day long for it, and never thought of anything else; and by autumn it was all in new leaf, and now its flowers are finer than ever.”

“But you watered it whilst you prayed, I suppose?”

The sarcasm escaped her.

She was wondering to herself whether it would be vain and wicked to pray for a pair of stockings:  she thought she would go and ask Father Francis.

By this time they were in the Rue Royale, and half-way down it.  The lamps were lighted.  A regiment was marching up it with a band playing.  The windows were open, and people were laughing and singing in some of them.  The light caught the white and gilded fronts of the houses.  The pleasure-seeking crowds loitered along in the warmth of the evening.

Bebee, suddenly roused from her thoughts by the loud challenge of the military music, looked round on the stranger, and motioned him back.

“Sir,—­I do not know you,—­why should you come with me?  Do not do it, please.  You make me talk, and that makes me late.”

And she pushed her basket farther on her arm, and nodded to him and ran off—­as fleetly as a hare through fern—­among the press of the people.

“To-morrow, little one,” he answered her with a careless smile, and let her go unpursued.  Above, from the open casement of a cafe, some young men and some painted women leaned out, and threw sweetmeats at him, as in carnival time.

“A new model,—­that pretty peasant?” they asked him.

He laughed in answer, and went up the steps to join them; he dropped the moss-roses as he went, and trod on them, and did not wait.

CHAPTER IV

Bebee ran home as fast as her feet would take her.

The children were all gathered about her gate in the dusky dewy evening; they met her with shouts of welcome and reproach intermingled; they had been watching for her since first the sun had grown low and red, and now the moon was risen.

But they forgave her when they saw the splendor of her presents, and she showered out among them Pere Melchior’s horn of comfits.

They dashed into the hut; they dragged the one little table out among the flowers; the cherries and cake were spread on it; and the miller’s wife had given a big jug of milk, and Father Francis himself had sent some honeycomb.