“Are you ill, you little thing?” a woman asked her who was gathering early cherries in the outskirts of the great city.

Bebee looked at her and smiled:  “I do not know—­I am happy.”

And she went onward.

It was evening.  The sun had set.  She had not eaten for twenty-four hours.  But she could not pause for anything now.  She crossed the gleaming river, and she heard the cathedral chimes.  Paris in all its glory was about her, but she took no more note of it than a pigeon that flies through it intent on reaching home.

No one looked at or stopped her; a little dusty peasant with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder.

The click-clack of her wooden shoes on the hot pavements made none look up; little rustics came up every day like this to make their fortunes in Paris.  Some grew into golden painted silken flowers, the convolvuli of their brief summer days; and some drifted into the Seine water, rusted, wind-tossed, fallen leaves, that were wanted of no man.  Anyhow it was so common to see them, pretty but homely things, with their noisy shoes and their little all in a bundle, that no one even looked once at Bebee.

She was not bewildered.  As she had gone through her own city, only thinking of the roses in her basket and of old Annemie in her garret, so she went through Paris, only thinking of him for whose sake she had come thither.

Now that she was really in his home she was happy,—­happy though her head ached with that dull odd pain, and all the sunny glare went round and round like a great gilded humming-top, such as the babies clapped their hands at, at the Kermesse.

She was happy:  she felt sure now that God would not let him die till she got to him.  She was quite glad that he had left her all that long, terrible winter, for she had learned so much and was so much more fitted to be with him.

Weary as she was, and strange as the pain in her head made her feel, she was happy, very happy; a warm flush came on her little pale cheeks as she thought how soon he would kiss them, her whole body thrilled with the old sweet nameless joy that she had sickened for in vain so long.

Though she saw nothing else that was around her, she saw some little knots of moss-roses that a girl was selling on the quay, as she used to sell them in front of the Maison du Roi.  She had only two sous left, but she stopped and bought two little rosebuds to take to him.  He had used to care for them so much in the summer in Brabant.

The girl who sold them told her the way to the street he lived in; it was not very far of the quay.  She seemed to float on air, to have wings like the swallows, to hear beautiful musk all around.  She felt for her beads, and said aves of praise.  God was so good.

It was quite night when she reached the street, and sought the number of his house.  She spoke his name softly, and trembling very much with joy, not with any fear, but it seemed to her too sacred a thing ever to utter aloud.