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 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.