It was the fairies, of course! but they had never set a rush-bottomed chair on its legs before, and this action of theirs frightened her.

It was rather an empty morning.  She sold little, and there was the more time to think.

About an hour after noon a voice addressed her,—­

“Have you more moss-roses for me?”

Bebee looked up with a smile, and found some.  It was her companion of the cathedral.  She had thought much of the red shoes and the silver clasps, but she had thought nothing at all of him.

“You are not too proud to be paid to-day?” he said, giving her a silver franc; he would not alarm her with any more gold; she thanked him, and slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on sorting some clove-pinks.

“You do not seem to remember me?” he said, with a little sadness.

“Oh, I remember you,” said Bebee, lifting her frank eyes.  “But you know I speak to so many people, and they are all nothing to me.”

“Who is anything to you?” It was softly and insidiously spoken, but it awoke no echo.

“Varnhart’s children,” she answered him, instantly.  “And old Annemie by the wharfside—­and Tambour—­and Antoine’s grave—­and the starling—­and, of course, above all, the flowers.”

“And the fairies, I suppose?—­though they do nothing for you.”

She looked at him eagerly,—­

“They have done something to-day.  I have found a box, and some stockings—­such beautiful stockings!  Silk ones!  Is it not very odd?”

“It is more odd they should have forgotten you so long.  May I see them?”

“I cannot show them to you now.  Those ladies are going to buy.  But you can see them later—­if you wait.”

“I will wait and paint the Broodhuis.”

“So many people do that; you are a painter then?”

“Yes—­in a way.”

He sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread his things there, and sketched, whilst the traffic went on around them.  He was very many years older than she; handsome, with a dark, and changeful, and listless face; he wore brown velvet, and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a little as Egmont might have done when wooing Claire.

Bebee, as she sold the flowers and took the change fifty times in the hour, glanced at him now and then, and watched the movements of his hands, she could not have told why.

Always among men and women, always in the crowds of the streets, people were nothing to her; she went through them as through a field of standing corn,—­only in the field she would have tarried for poppies, and in the town she tarried for no one.

She dealt with men as with women, simply, truthfully, frankly, with the innocent fearlessness of a child.  When they told her she was pretty, she smiled; it was just as they said that her flowers were sweet.

But this man’s hands moved so swiftly; and as she saw her Broodhuis growing into color and form beneath them, she could not choose but look now and then, and twice she gave her change wrong.