Good night."

A moment afterwards the little rickety door was shut, and the rusty bolt
drawn within it; Jeannot stood in the cool summer night all alone, and
knew how stupid he had been in his wrath.

He leaned on the gate a minute; then crossed the garden as softly as his
wooden shoes would let him. He tapped gently on the shutter of the
lattice.

"Bebee--Bebee--just listen. I spoke roughly, dear--I know I have no
right. I am sorry. Will you be friends with me again?--do be friends
again."

She opened the shutter a little way, so that he could see her
pretty mouth speaking, "we are friends--we will always be friends,
of course--only you do not know. Good night."

He went away with a heavy heart and a long-drawn step. He would have
preferred that she should have been angry with him.

Bebee, left alone, let the clothes drop off her pretty round shoulders
and her rosy limbs, and shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book,
and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with a smile on her face.

Only, as she slept, her ringers moved as if she were counting her beads,
and her lips murmured,--

"Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to think of--yes. I know--all the
poor, and all the little children. But take care of _him_; he is called
Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of Burgundy; you cannot miss
him; and if you will look for him always, and have a heed that the angels
never leave him, I will give you my great cactus glower--my only one--on
your Feast of Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you will not
forget!"

CHAPTER XII.

Bebee was a dreamer in her way, and aspired to be a scholar too. But all
the same, she was not a little fool.

She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest ways of living, and would
have thought it as shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to other
folk.

So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, full of strange fantasies,
none the less was she out in her garden by daybreak; none the less did
she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the fowls, and wash out her
bit of linen and hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting
hollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because they reached to the
roof.

"What do you want with books, Bebee?" said Reine, the sabot-maker's wife,
across the privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen. "Franz told me
you were reading last night. It is the silver buckles have done that: one
mischief always begets an