butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to be
off with his milk-cans.

So Bébée, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself,
ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of
the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet
along the grassy paths toward the city.

The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was
sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning,
tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had
served to shelter Antoine Mäes from heat and rain through all the years
of his life.

"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blue
eyes, Bébée," people had said to her of late; but Bébée had shaken her
head.

Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit so
long as she sold flowers in Brussels,--here, underneath the shadow of the
Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.

Old Antoine had never gone into the grand market that is fashioned after
the Madeleine of Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling halls,
all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal of
Una, and large as the shield of the Red-Cross Knight.

Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse and
stove. He had always had his little stall among those which spread their
tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms under the shadow of the