she put the box behind her with a beating heart, and tied up her flowers.

It was the fairies, of course! but they had never set a rush-bottomed
chair on its legs before, and this action of theirs frightened her.

It was rather an empty morning. She sold little, and there was the more
time to think.

About an hour after noon a voice addressed her,--

"Have you more moss-roses for me?"

Bebee looked up with a smile, and found some. It was her companion of the
cathedral. She had thought much of the red shoes and the silver clasps,
but she had thought nothing at all of him.

"You are not too proud to be paid to-day?" he said, giving her a silver
franc; he would not alarm her with any more gold; she thanked him, and
slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on sorting some
clove-pinks.

"You do not seem to remember me?" he said, with a little sadness.

"Oh, I remember you," said Bebee, lifting her frank eyes. "But you know I
speak to so many people, and they are all nothing to me."

"Who is anything to you?" It was softly and insidiously spoken, but it
awoke no echo.

"Varnhart's children," she answered him, instantly. "And old Annemie by
the wharfside--and Tambour--and Antoine's grave--and the starling--and,
of course, above all, the flowers."

"And the fairies, I suppose?--though they do nothing for you."

She looked at him eagerly,--

"They have done something to-day. I have found a box, and some
stockings--such beautiful stockings! Silk ones! Is it not very odd?"

"It is more odd they should have forgotten you so long. May I see them?"

"I cannot show them to you now. Those ladies are going to buy. But you
can see them later--if you wait."

"I will wait and paint the Broodhuis."

"So many people do that; you are a painter then?"

"Yes--in a way."

He sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread his things there, and
sketched, whilst the traffic went on around them. He was very many years
older than she; handsome, with a dark, and changeful, and listless face;
he wore brown velvet, and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a
little as Egmont might have done when wooing Claire.

Bebee, as she sold the flowers and took the change fifty times in the
hour, glanced at him now and then, and watched the movements of his
hands, she could not have told why.

Always among men and women, always in the crowds of the streets, people
were nothing to her; she went through them as through a field o