“Antoine should never have taught you your letters,” said Reine, groaning under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves.  “I told him so at the time.  I said, ’The child is a good child, and spins, and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?’ But he was always headstrong.  Not a child of mine knows a letter, the saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish.  You should have been brought up the same.  You would have come to no trouble then.”

“I am in no trouble, dear Reine,” said Bebee, scattering the potato-peels to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.

“Not yet,” said Reine, hanging her last shirt.

But Bebee was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling the oxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she was counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mere Krebs’s—­the only clock in the lane—­should crow out the hour at which she went down to the city.

She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to her now compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changing crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows of the throngs for one face and for one smile.

“He is sure to be there,” she thought, and started half an hour earlier than was her wont.  She wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book; no one else could understand.

But all the day through he never came.

Bebee sat with a sick heart and a parched little throat, selling her flowers and straining her eyes through the tumult of the square.

The whole day went by, and there was no sign of him.

The flowers had sold well:  it was a feast day; her pouch was full of pence—­what was that to her?

She went and prayed in the cathedral, but it seemed cold, and desolate, and empty; even the storied windows seemed dark.

“Perhaps he is gore out of the city,” she thought; and a terror fell on her that frightened her, it was so unlike any fear that she had ever known—­even the fear when she had seen death on old Antoine’s face had been nothing like this.

Going home through the streets, she passed the cafe of the Trois Freres that looks out on the trees of the park, and that has flowers in its balconies, and pleasant windows that stand open to let the sounds of the soldiers’ music enter.  She saw him in one of the windows.  There were amber and scarlet and black; silks and satins and velvets.  There was a fan painted and jewelled.  There were women’s faces.  There was a heap of purple fruit and glittering sweetmeats.  He laughed there.  His beautiful Murillo head was dark against the white and gold within.

Bebee looked up,—­paused a second,—­then went onward, with a thorn in her heart.

He Had not seen her.