“How late you are working to-night, Bebee!” one or two called out, as they passed the gate.  She looked up and smiled; but went on working while the white moon rose.

She did not know what ailed her.

She went to bed without supper, leaving her bit of bread and bowl of goat’s milk to make a meal for the fowls in the morning.

“Little ugly, shameful, naked feet!” she said to them, sitting on the edge of her mattress, and looking at them in the moonlight.  They were very pretty feet, and would not have been half so pretty in silk hose and satin shoon; but she did not know that:  he had told her she wanted those vanities.

She sat still a long while, her rosy feet swaying to and fro like two roses that grow on one stalk and hang down in the wind.  The little lattice was open; the sweet and dusky garden was beyond; there was a hand’s breadth of sky, in which a single star was shining; the leaves of the vine hid all the rest.

But for once she saw none of it.

She only saw the black Broodhuis; the red and gold sunset overhead; the gray stones, with the fallen rose leaves and crushed fruits; and in the shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, that looked at hers.

Had she been ungrateful?

The little tender, honest heart of her was troubled and oppressed.  For once, that night she slept ill.

CHAPTER VI.

All the next day she sat under the yellow awning, but she sat alone.

It was market day; there were many strangers.  Flowers were in demand.  The copper pieces were ringing against one another all the hours through in her leathern bag.  The cobbler was in such good humor that he forgot to quarrel with his wife.  The fruit was in such plenty that they gave her a leaf-full of white and red currants for her noonday dinner.  And the people split their sides at the Cheap John’s jokes; he was so droll.  No one saw the leaks in his kettles or the hole in his bellows, or the leg that was lacking to his milking stool.

Everybody was gay and merry that day.  But Bebee’s eyes looked wistfully over the throng, and did not find what they sought.  Somehow the day seemed dull, and the square empty.

The stones and the timbers around seemed more than ever full of a thousand stories that they would not tell her because she knew nothing, and was only Bebee.

She had never known a dull hour before.  She, a little bright, industrious, gay thing, whose hands were always full of work, and whose head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when she wove the lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with the frost on the casements, and the mice running out in their hunger over the bare brick floor.

That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the children dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they had come out without a crust to break their fast.