And the people split their sides at the Cheap John's jokes; he was so droll.

No one saw the leaks in his kettles or the hole in his bellows, or the leg that was lacking to his milking stool.
Everybody was gay and merry that day.

But Bebee's eyes looked wistfully over the throng, and did not find what they sought.

Somehow the day seemed dull, and the square empty.
The stones and the timbers around seemed more than ever full of a thousand stories that they would not tell her because she knew nothing, and was only Bebee.
She had never known a dull hour before.

She, a little bright, industrious, gay thing, whose hands were always full of work, and whose head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when she wove the lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with the frost on the casements, and the mice running out in their hunger over the bare brick floor.
That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the children dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they had come out without a crust to break their fast.
She had been sad there often for others, but she had never been dull--not with this unfamiliar, desolate, dreary dulness, that seemed to take all the mirth out of the busy life around her, and all the color out of the blue sky above.