running to meet her, screamed with glee, and danced in the gay morning.

"Oh, Bébée! 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 Bébée 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, Bébée, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes."

But Bébée danced with the child, and did not hear.

Whose fête 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 Bébée 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