never touched the things. But look here, Bebee, you are a good child and
true, and like her just a little. I mean to give you her silver clasps.
They were her great-great-great-grandmother's before her. God knows how
old they are not. And a girl should have some little wealth of that sort;
and for Antoine's sake--"

The old man stayed behind, closing the press door upon the
lavender-scented clothes, and sitting down in the dull shadow of the hut
to think of his daughter, dead forty summers and more.

Bebee went out with the brave broad silver clasps about her waist, and
the tears wet on her cheeks for a grief not her own.

To be killed just when one was young, and was loved liked that, and
all the world was in its May-day flower! The silver felt cold to her
touch--as cold as though it were the dead girl's hands that held her.

The garlands that the children strung of daisies and hung about her had
never chilled her so.

But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoal-burner's little tribe,
running to meet her, screamed with glee, and danced in the gay morning.

"Oh, Bebee! how you glitter! Did the Virgin send you that off her own
altar? Let me see--let me touch! Is it made of the stars or of the sun?"

And Bebee danced with the child, and the silver gleamed and sparkled, and
all the people came running out to see, and the milk carts were half an
hour later for town, and the hens cackled loud unfed, and the men even
stopped on their way to the fields and paused, with their scythes on
their shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift.

"There is not such another set of clasps in Brabant; old work you could
make a fortune of in the curiosity shops in the Montagne," said Trine
Krebs, going up the steps of her mill house. "But, all the same, you
know, Bebee, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes."

But Bebee danced with the child, and did not hear.

Whose fete day had ever begun like this one of hers?

She was a little poet at heart, and should not have cared for such
vanities; but when one is only sixteen, and has only a little rough
woollen frock, and sits in the market place or the lace-room, with other
girls around, how should one be altogether indifferent to a broad,
embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step one
took?

A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, that Bebee or her
friends could spare at five o'clock on a summer morning, when the city
was waiting for its