ringing for vespers.

"Eleven voyages one and another, and he never forgot to tie the flax
to the mast," Annémie murmured, with her old wrinkled face leaning out
into the gray air. "It used to fly there,--one could see it coming up
half a mile off,--just a pale yellow flake on the wind, like a tress of
my hair, he would say. No, no, I could not go away; he may come to-night,
to-morrow, any time; he is not drowned, not my man; he was all I had, and
God is good, they say."

Bébée listened and looked; then kissed the old shaking hand and took up
the lace patterns and went softly out of the room without speaking.

When old Annémie watched at the window it was useless to seek for any
word or sign of her: people said that she had never been quite right in
her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years before, when the
coaster had brought into port the broken beam of the good brig "Fleur
d'Epine."

Bébée did not know about that, nor heed whether her wits were right or
not.

She had known the old creature in the lace-room where Annémie pricked out
designs, and she had conceived a great regard and sorrow for her; and
when Annémie had become too ailing and aged to go herself any longer to
the lace-maker's place, Bébée had begged leave for her to have the
patterns at home, and had carried them to and fro for her for the last
three or four years, doing many other little useful services for the lone
old soul as well,--services which Annémie hardly perceived, she had
grown so used to them, and her feeble intelligence was so sunk in the one