“Sir, see, you speak to me quite wrongly,” she said with a quick accent, that had pride as well as pain in it.  “Say it was kind to bring me what I wished for; yes, it was kind I know; but you never saw me till last night, and I cannot tell even your name; and it is very wrong to lie to any one, even to a little thing like me; and I am only Bebee, and cannot give you anything back, because I have only just enough to feed myself and the starling, and not always that in winter.  I thank you very much for what you wished to do; but if I had taken those things, I think you would have thought me very mean and full of greed; and Antoine always said, ’Do not take what you cannot pay—­not ever what you cannot pay—­that is the way to walk with pure feet.’  Perhaps I spoke ill, because they spoil me, and they say I am too swift to say my mind.  But I am not thankless—­not thankless, indeed—­it is only I could not take what I cannot pay.  That is all.  You are angry still—­not now—­no?”

There was, anxiety in the pleading.  What did it matter to her what a stranger thought?

And yet Bebee’s heart was heavy as he laughed a little coldly, and bade her good day, and left her alone to go out of the city homewards.  A sense of having done wrong weighed on her; of having been rude and ungrateful.

She had no heart for the children that evening.  Mere Krebs was sitting out before her door shelling peas, and called to her to come in and have a drop of coffee.  Krebs had come in from Vilvoeorde fair, and brought a stock of rare good berries with him.  But Bebee thanked her, and went on to her own garden to work.

She had always liked to sit out on the quaint wooden steps of the mill and under the red shadow of the sails, watching the swallows flutter to and fro in the sunset, and hearing the droll frogs croak in the rushes, while the old people told her tales of the time of how in their babyhood they had run out, fearful yet fascinated, to see the beautiful Scots Grays flash by in the murky night, and the endless line of guns and caissons crawl black as a snake through the summer dust and the trampled corn, going out past the woods to Waterloo.

But to-night she had no fancy for it:  she wanted to be alone with the flowers.

Though, to be sure, they had been very heartless when Antoine’s coffin had gone past them, still they had sympathy; the daisies smiled at her with their golden eyes, and the roses dropped tears on her hand, just as her mood might be; the flowers were closer friends, after all, than any human souls; and besides, she could say so much to them!

Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its Golden Age; the only perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine, useless, say they who are wiser than God.

Bebee went home and worked among her flowers.

A little laborious figure, with her petticoats twisted high, and her feet wet with the night dews, and her back bowed to the hoeing and clipping and raking among the blossoming plants.