“Pooh!” said the fifth, stouter and better clothed than the rest.  “You are all eager for your own good, not for hers.  Now I—­Father Francis says we should all do as we would be done by—­I will take Bebee to live with me, all for nothing; and we will root the flowers up and plant it with good cabbages and potatoes and salad plants.  And I will stable my cows in the hut to sweeten it after a dead man, and I will take my chance of making money out of it, and no one can speak more fair than that when one sees what weather is, and thinks what insects do; and all the year round, winter and summer, Bebee here will want for nothing, and have to take no care for herself whatever.”

She who spoke, Mere Krebs, was the best-to-do woman in the little lane, having two cows of her own and ear-rings of solid silver, and a green cart, and a big dog that took the milk into Brussels.  She was heard, therefore, with respect, and a short silence followed her words.

But it was very short; and a hubbub of voices crossed each other after it as the speakers grew hotter against one another and more eager to convince each other of the disinterestedness and delicacy of their offers of aid.

Through it all Bebee sat quite quiet on the edge of the little truckle-bed, with her eyes fixed on the apple bough and the singing chaffinch.

She heard them all patiently.

They were all her good friends, friends old and true.  This one had given her cherries for many a summer.  That other had bought her a little waxen Jesus at the Kermesse.  The old woman in the blue linen skirt had taken her to her first communion.  She who wanted her sister to have the crust and the flowers, had brought her a beautiful painted book of hours that had cost a whole franc.  Another had given her the solitary wonder, travel, and foreign feast of her whole life,—­a day fifteen miles away at the fair at Mechlin.  The last speaker of all had danced her on her knee a hundred times in babyhood, and told her legends, and let her ride in the green cart behind big curly-coated Tambour.

Bebee did not doubt that these trusty old friends meant well by her, and yet a certain heavy sense fell on her that in all these counsels there was not the same whole-hearted and frank goodness that had prompted the gifts to her of the waxen Jesus, and the Kermesse of Mechlin.

Bebee did not reason, because she was too little a thing and too trustful; but she felt, in a vague, sorrowful fashion, that they were all of them trying to make some benefit out of her poor little heritage, with small regard for herself at the root of their speculations.

Bebee was a child, wholly a child; body and soul were both as fresh in her as a golden crocus just born out of the snows.  But she was not a little fool, though people sometimes called her so because she would sit in the moments of her leisure with her blue eyes on the far-away clouds like a thing in a dream.