Why, she had no idea herself.

She wondered if she were going to be ill; she had never been ill in her life, being strong as a little bird that has never known cage or captivity.
When the day was done, Bebee gave a quick sigh as she looked across the square.

She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful; and she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbrier, and a tiny spray of maidenhair fern that grew under the willows, which she had kept covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.
No one would have it now.
The child went out of the place sadly as the carillon rang.

There was only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that had been given her for her dinner.
She went along the twisting, many-colored, quaintly fashioned streets, till she came to the water-side.
It is very ancient there still, there are all manner of old buildings, black and brown and gray, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors, crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface of the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and go with all the year round, to and from the ZuyderZee, and the Baltic water, and the wild Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish headlands, and the pretty gray Norman seaports, and the white sandy dunes of Holland, with the toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.
Bebee was fond of watching the brigs and barges, that looked so big to her, with their national flags flying, and their tall masts standing thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and about them the sweet, strong smell of that strange, unknown thing, the sea.
Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; sometimes some old salt, sitting astride of a cask, would tell her a mariner's tale of far-away lands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy would give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was forever changing and moving, and curling and leaping, and making itself now blue as her eyes, now black as that thunder-cloud, now white as the snow that the winter wind tossed, now pearl hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in her own garden.
And Bebee would listen, with the shell in her lap, and try to understand, and gaze at the ships and then at the sky beyond them, and try to figure to herself those strange countries to which these ships were always going, and saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard province of green France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many lands that had no place at all except in dreamland, and were more beautiful even than the beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their own sorrow, oftentimes.
But this dull day Bebee did not go down upon the wharf; she did not want the sailors' tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that streamed from them, and they made her restless, which they had never done before.
Instead she went in at a dark old door and climbed up a steep staircase that went up and up, as though she were mounting St.Gudule's belfry towers; and at the top of it entered a little chamber in the roof, where one square unglazed hole that served for light looked out upon the canal, with all its crowded craft, from the dainty schooner yacht, fresh as gilding and holystone could make her, that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy coal barge, black as night, that bore the rough diamonds of Belgium to the snow-buried roofs of Christiania and Stromstad.
In the little dark attic there was a very old woman in a red petticoat and a high cap, who sat against the window, and pricked out lace patterns with a pin on thick paper.

She was eighty-five years old, and could hardly keep body and soul together.
Bebee, running to her, kissed her.