Bebee listened and looked; then kissed the old shaking hand and took up the lace patterns and went softly out of the room without speaking.

When old Annemie watched at the window it was useless to seek for any word or sign of her:  people said that she had never been quite right in her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years before, when the coaster had brought into port the broken beam of the good brig “Fleur d’Epine.”

Bebee did not know about that, nor heed whether her wits were right or not.

She had known the old creature in the lace-room where Annemie pricked out designs, and she had conceived a great regard and sorrow for her; and when Annemie had become too ailing and aged to go herself any longer to the lace-maker’s place, Bebee had begged leave for her to have the patterns at home, and had carried them to and fro for her for the last three or four years, doing many other little useful services for the lone old soul as well,—­services which Annemie hardly perceived, she had grown so used to them, and her feeble intelligence was so sunk in the one absorbing idea that she must watch all the days through and all the years through for the coming of the dead man and the lost brig.

Bebee put the lace patterns in her basket, and trotted home, her sabots clattering on the stones.

“What it must be to care for any one like that!” she thought, and by some vague association of thought that she could not have pursued, she lifted the leaves and looked at the moss-rosebud.

It was quite dead.

CHAPTER VII.

As she got clear of the city and out on her country road, a shadow Fell across her in the evening light.

“Have you had a good day, little one?” asked a voice that made her stop with a curious vague expectancy and pleasure.

“It is you!” she said, with a little cry, as she saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning on a gate midway in the green and solitary road that leads to Laeken.

“Yes, it is I,” he answered, as he joined her.  “Have you forgiven me, Bebee?”

She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes, like those of a child in fault.

“Oh, I did not sleep all night!” she said, simply.  “I thought I had been rude and ungrateful, and I could not be sure I had done right, though to have done otherwise would certainly have been wrong.”

He laughed.

“Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to be drawn from most moral uncertainties.  Do not think twice about the matter, my dear.  I have not, I assure you.”

“No!”

She was a little disappointed.  It seemed such an immense thing to her; and she had lain awake all the night, turning it about in her little brain, and appealing vainly for help in it to the sixteen sleep-angels.

“No, indeed.  And where are you going so fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were sandals of Mercury?”