All the next day she sat under the yellow awning, but she sat alone.

It was market day; there were many strangers. Flowers were in demand. The
copper pieces were ringing against one another all the hours through in
her leathern bag. The cobbler was in such good humor that he forgot to
quarrel with his wife. The fruit was in such plenty that they gave her a
leaf-full of white and red currants for her noonday dinner. And the
people split their sides at the Cheap John's jokes; he was so droll. No
one saw the leaks in his kettles or the hole in his bellows, or the leg
that was lacking to his milking stool.

Everybody was gay and merry that day. But Bébée's eyes looked wistfully
over the throng, and did not find what they sought. Somehow the day
seemed dull, and the square empty.

The stones and the timbers around seemed more than ever full of a
thousand stories that they would not tell her because she knew nothing,
and was only Bébée.

She had never known a dull hour before. She, a little bright,
industrious, gay thing, whose hands were always full of work, and whose
head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when
she wove the lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with the frost on the
casements, and the mice running out in their hunger over the bare brick
floor.

That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would
bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women
sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the