the sun.

She let them do as they liked, only she seemed neither to hear nor speak,
and she never spoke.

All that Jeannot could tell was that he had found her in Paris, and had
saved her from the river.

The women were sorrowful, and reproached themselves. Perhaps she had done
wrong, but they had been harsh, and she was so young.

The two little sabots with the holes worn through the soles touched them;
and they blamed themselves for having shut their hearts and their doors
against her as they saw the fixed blue eyes, without any light in them,
and the pretty mouth closed close against either sob or smile.

After all she was Bebee--the little bright blithe thing that had danced
with their children, and sung to their singing, and brought them always
the first roses of the year. If she had been led astray, they should have
been gentler with her.

So they told themselves and each other.

What had she seen in that terrible Paris to change her like this?--they
could not tell She never spoke.

The cock crowed gayly to the sun. The lamb bleated in the meadow. The
bees boomed among the pear-tree blossoms. The gray lavender blew in the
open house door. The green leaves threw shifting shadows on the floor.

All things were just the same as they had been the year before, when she
had woke to the joy of being a girl of sixteen.

But Bebee now lay quite still and silent on her little bed; as quiet as
the waxen Gesu that they laid in the manger at the Nativity.

"If she would only speak!" the women and the children wailed, weeping
sorely.

But she never spoke; nor did she seem to know any one of them. Not even
the starling as he flew on her pillow and called her.

"Give her rest," they all said; and one by one moved away, being poor
folk and hard working, and unable to lose a whole day.

Mere Krebs stayed with her, and Jeannot sat in the porch where her little
spinning-wheel stood, and rocked himself to and fro; in vain agony,
powerless.

He had done all he could, and it was of no avail.

Then people who had loved her, hearing, came up the green lanes from the
city--the cobbler and the tinman, and the old woman who sold saints'
pictures by the Broodhuis. The Varnhart children hung about the garden
wicket, frightened and sobbing. Old Jehan beat his knees with his hands,
and said only over and over again, "Another dead--another dead!--the red
mill and I see them all dead!"

The long golden day drifted away, and th