Bébée had her own way, and the fairies, or the saints, or both together,
took care of her; and so it came to pass that all alone she heard the
cock crow whilst it was dark, and woke to the grand and amazing truth
that this warm, fragrant, dusky June morning found her full sixteen years
old.




CHAPTER II.


The two years had not been all playtime any more than they had been all
summer.

When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends
have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor
its crusts very many at any time.

Bébée had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's eyes, and a poet's thoughts
sometimes in her own untaught and unconscious fashion.

But all the same she was a little hard-working Brabant peasant girl;
up whilst the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sun
sank beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, and
watered, and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean as
a fresh-blossomed primrose; she milked her goat and swept her floor; she
sat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in the
winter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sight
over lace-making in the city to get the small bit of food that stood