eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and its
butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to be
off with his milk-cans.

So Bebee, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself,
ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of
the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet
along the grassy paths toward the city.

The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was
sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning,
tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had
served to shelter Antoine Maees from heat and rain through all the years
of his life.

"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blue
eyes, Bebee," people had said to her of late; but Bebee had shaken her
head.

Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit so
long as she sold flowers in Brussels,--here, underneath the shadow of the
Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.

Old Antoine had never gone into the grand market that is fashioned after
the Madeleine of Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling halls,
all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal of
Una, and large as the shield of the Red-Cross Knight.

Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse and
stove. He had always had his little stall among those which spread their
tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms under the shadow of the
Hotel de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings, the games and
the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mountebank and the
marriage parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.

Here Bebee, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him. By
nature she was as gay as a lark. The people always heard her singing as
they passed the garden. The children never found their games so merry as
when she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so much
out there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the long,
low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the
cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of hue and
sunny in their fantasies. Still, Bebee had one sad unsatisfied desire:
she wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.

She did not care for the grand gay people.

When the band played, and the park filled, and the bright l