good to look at," she said, softly. "Keep me as you keep the flowers, and
let my face be always fair, because it is a pleasure to _be_ a pleasure.
Ah, dear Mother, I say it so badly, and it sounds so vain, I know. But I
do not think you will be angry, will you? And I am going to try to be
wise."

Then she murmured an ave or two, to be in form as it were, and then rose
and ran along the lanes with her baskets, and brushed the dew lightly
over her bare feet, and sang a little Flemish song for very joyousness,
as the birds sing in the apple bough.

She got the money for Annémie and took it to her with fresh patterns to
prick, and the new-laid eggs.

"I wonder what he meant by a dog's heart?" she thought to herself, as she
left the old woman sitting by the hole in the roof pricking out the
parchment in all faith that she earned her money, and looking every now
and then through the forests of masts for the brig with the hank of flax
flying,--the brig that had foundered fifty long years before in the
northern seas, and in the days of her youth.

"What is the dog's heart?" thought Bébée; she had seen a dog she knew--a
dog which all his life long had dragged heavy loads under brutal stripes
along the streets of Brussels--stretch himself on the grave of his
taskmaster and refuse to eat, and persist in lying there until he died,
though he had no memory except of stripes, and no tie to the dead except
pain and sorrow. Was it a heart like this that he meant?

"Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?" she asked an old gossip of
Annémie's, as she went down the stairs.