the flowers.

All the same, however stirring trade might be in summer, when the long
winters came and the Montagne de la Cour was a sharp slope of ice, and
the pinnacles of St. Gudule were all frosted white with snow, and the
hot-house flowers alone could fill the market, and the country gardens
were bitter black wind-swept desolations where the chilly roots huddled
themselves together underground like homeless children in a cellar,--then
the money gained in the time of leaf and blossom was all needed to buy a
black loaf and fagot of wood; and many a day in the little pink hut Bébée
rolled herself up in her bed like a dormouse, to forget in sleep that she
was supperless and as cold as a frozen robin.

So that when Antoine Mäes grew sick and died, more from age and weakness
than any real disease, there were only a few silver crowns in the brown
jug hidden in the thatch; and the hut itself, with its patch of ground,
was all that he could leave to Bébée.

"Live in it, little one, and take nobody in it to worry you, and be good
to the bird and the goat, and be sure to keep the flowers blowing," said
the old man with his last breath; and sobbing her heart out by his
bedside, Bébée vowed to do his bidding.

She was not quite fourteen then, and when she had laid her old friend to
rest in the rough green graveyard about St. Guido, she was very sorrowful
and lonely, poor little, bright Bébée, who had never hardly known a worse
woe than to run the thorns of the roses into her fingers, or to cry
because a thrush was found starved to death in the snow.

Bébée went home, and sat down in a corner and thought.