"Antoine should never have taught you your letters," said Reine, groaning
under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. "I
told him so at the time. I said, 'The child is a good child, and spins,
and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?'
But he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine knows a letter, the
saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You
should have been brought up the same. You would have come to no trouble
then."

"I am in no trouble, dear Reine," said Bébée, scattering the potato-peels
to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden
oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.

"Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last shirt.

But Bébée was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling the
oxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she was
counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mère Krebs's--the
only clock in the lane--should crow out the hour at which she went down
to the city.

She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to her
now compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changing
crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows of
the throngs for one face and for one smile.

"He is sure to be there," she thought, and started half an hour earlier
than was her wont. She wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book; no
one else could understand.