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The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mère Krebs would shake her head as she went by on her sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head would be turned by vanity; and old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer through the sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could make Bébée's face beam over again upon that panel of wood could not give him back his dead daughter who had been pushed away under the black earth so long, long before, when the red mill had been brave and new, the red mill that the boys and girls called old.
"And besides, if I can save a centime, the Varnhart children ought to have it," thought Bébée, as she swept the dust together. It was so selfish of her to be dreaming about a pair of stockings, when those little things often went for days on a stew of nettles.
So it came to pass that Bébée's day in the big forest came and went as simply almost as any day that she had played away with the Varnhart children under the beech shadows of Cambre woods.
Her little face was pale as she sat among her glowing autumn blossoms, by the side of the cobbler's stall; and when the Varnhart children cried at the gate to her to come and play, she would answer gently that she was too busy to have play-time now.
"Why take a present then from the Varnhart children, or your old friend who gave you the clasps?" "Ah, that is very different.
"Ah, but I always tell them everything," said Bébée. whose imagination had been already busy with the wonders that she would unfold to Mère Krebs and the Varnhart children. "Then you will see but little of me, my dear. Learn to be silent, Bébée. It is a woman's first duty, though her hardest." "Is it?" She did not speak for some time.
They had a meal, the like of which she had never seen; such a huge melon in the centre of it, and curious wines, and coffee or cream in silver pots, or what looked like silver to her "just like the altar-vases in the church," she said to herself. "If only the Varnhart children were here!" she cried; but he did not echo the wish. It was just sunset.
Then people who had loved her, hearing, came up the green lanes from the city the cobbler and the tinman, and the old woman who sold saints' pictures by the Broodhuis. The Varnhart children hung about the garden wicket, frightened and sobbing. Old Jehan beat his knees with his hands, and said only over and over again, "Another dead another dead! the red mill and I see them all dead!"
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal-burner, who were as poor as any mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up the lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tied round with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week, all in her honor. "Only see, Bébée! Such a grand cake!" they shouted, dancing down the lane.
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