But Bebee thanked her, and went on to her own garden to work.
She had always liked to sit out on the quaint wooden steps of the mill and under the red shadow of the sails, watching the swallows flutter to and fro in the sunset, and hearing the droll frogs croak in the rushes, while the old people told her tales of the time of how in their babyhood they had run out, fearful yet fascinated, to see the beautiful Scots Grays flash by in the murky night, and the endless line of guns and caissons crawl black as a snake through the summer dust and the trampled corn, going out past the woods to Waterloo.
But to-night she had no fancy for it: she wanted to be alone with the flowers.
Though, to be sure, they had been very heartless when Antoine's coffin had gone past them, still they had sympathy; the daisies smiled at her with their golden eyes, and the roses dropped tears on her hand, just as her mood might be; the flowers were closer friends, after all, than any human souls; and besides, she could say so much to them! Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its Golden Age; the only perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine, useless, say they who are wiser than God.
Bebee went home and worked among her flowers.
A little laborious figure, with her petticoats twisted high, and her feet wet with the night dews, and her back bowed to the hoeing and clipping and raking among the blossoming plants.
"How late you are working to-night, Bebee!" one or two called out, as they passed the gate.

She looked up and smiled; but went on working while the white moon rose.
She did not know what ailed her.
She went to bed without supper, leaving her bit of bread and bowl of goat's milk to make a meal for the fowls in the morning.
"Little ugly, shameful, naked feet!" she said to them, sitting on the edge of her mattress, and looking at them in the moonlight.

They were very pretty feet, and would not have been half so pretty in silk hose and satin shoon; but she did not know that: he had told her she wanted those vanities.
She sat still a long while, her rosy feet swaying to and fro like two roses that grow on one stalk and hang down in the wind.

The little lattice was open; the sweet and dusky garden was beyond; there was a hand's breadth of sky, in which a single star was shining; the leaves of the vine hid all the rest.
But for once she saw none of it.
She only saw the black Broodhuis; the red and gold sunset overhead; the gray stones, with the fallen rose leaves and crushed fruits; and in the shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, that looked at hers.
Had she been ungrateful?
The little tender, honest heart of her was troubled and oppressed.

For once, that night she slept ill..