into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy.

Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the cathedral,
across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all alone, laden
with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their white glory hides
its curly head.

In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent
grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses,
or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool warehouse, or a waterspout with a
grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humor of the Moyen-âge above the
bent head of a young lace-worker.

In all these, Brussels, though more worldly than her sisters of Ghent and
Bruges, and far more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg and
Nürnberg, is still in her own way like as a monkish story mixed up with
the Romaunt of the Rose; or rather like some gay French vaudeville, all
fashion and jest, illustrated in old Missal manner with helm and hauberk,
cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests, winged griffins and
nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and enamoured princes, all
mingled together in the illuminated colors and the heroical grotesque
romance of the Middle Ages.

And it was this side of the city that Bébée knew; and she loved it well,
and would not leave it for the market of the Madeleine.

She had no one to tell her anything, and all Antoine had ever been able
to say to her concerning the Broodhuis was that it had been there in his
father's time; and regarding St. Gudule, that his mother had burned many
a candle before its altars for a dead brother who had been drowned off