Bébée, left alone, let the clothes drop off her pretty round shoulders
and her rosy limbs, and shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book,
and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with a smile on her face.

Only, as she slept, her ringers moved as if she were counting her beads,
and her lips murmured,--

"Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to think of--yes. I know--all the
poor, and all the little children. But take care of _him_; he is called
Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of Burgundy; you cannot miss
him; and if you will look for him always, and have a heed that the angels
never leave him, I will give you my great cactus glower--my only one--on
your Feast of Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you will not
forget!"




CHAPTER XII.


Bébée was a dreamer in her way, and aspired to be a scholar too. But all
the same, she was not a little fool.

She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest ways of living, and would
have thought it as shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to other
folk.

So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, full of strange fantasies,
none the less was she out in her garden by daybreak; none the less did