She got up and obeyed him, not comprehending, but only vaguely seeing that he was friendly to her, and would pass her over into France.

The old man made a little comedy at the barrier, and scolded her as though she were his daughter for losing her way as she came to meet him, and then crying like a baby.

The guards looked at her carelessly, joked the hawker on her pretty face, looked the papers over, and let her through, believing her the child of the clock-maker of the Hartz.  Some lies are blessed as truth.

“I have done wrong in the law, but not before God, I think, little one,” said the pedler.  “Nay, do not thank me, or go on like that; we are in sight of the customs men still, and if they suspected, it would be the four walls of a cell only that you and I should see to-night.  And now tell me your story, poor maiden:  why are you on foot through a strange country?”

But Bebee would not tell him her story:  she was confused and dazed still.  She did not know rightly what had happened to her; but she could not talk of herself, nor of why she travelled thus to Paris.

The old hawker got cross at her silence, and called her an unthankful jade, and wished that he had left her to her fate, and parted company with her at two cross-roads, saying his path did not lie with hers; and then when he had done that, was sorry, and being a tenderhearted soul, hobbled back, and would fain press a five-franc piece on her; and Bebee, refusing it all the while, kissed his old brown hands and blessed him, and broke away from him, and so went on again solitary towards St. Quentin.

The country was very flat and poor, and yet the plains had a likeness in them to her own wide Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat was blowing and the barges dropping down the sluggish streams.

She was very footsore; very weary; very hungry so often; but she was in France—­in his country; and her spirit rose with the sense of that nearness to him.

After all, God was so good to her; there were fine bright days and nights; a few showers had fallen, but merely passing ones; the air was so cool and so balmy that it served her almost as food; and she seldom found people so unkind that they refused for her single little sou to give her a crust of bread and let her lie in an outhouse.

After all, God was very good; and by the sixteenth or seventeenth day she would be in the city of Paris.

She was a little light-headed at times from insufficient nourishment:  especially after waking from strange dreams in unfamiliar places; sometimes the soil felt tremulous under her, and the sky spun round; but she struggled against the feeling, and kept a brave heart, and tried to be afraid of nothing.

Sometimes at night she thought she saw old Annemie.  “But what if I do?” she said to herself; “Annemie never will hurt me.”