Save the little one, dear Bebee, do you hear?
and I will pray God and speak fair the neighbors for you.

Go!" Bebee rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar sound of a human voice, and looked at the breathless mother with eyes of pitying wonder.
"Surely I will go," she said, gently; "but there is no need to bribe me.
I have not sinned greatly--that I know." Then she went out quickly and ran through the lanes and into the city for the sick child, and found the wise man, and sent him, and did the errand rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic instinct than in any reasoning consciousness of doing good.
When she was moving through the once familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes were ringing from the many towers, a strange sense of unreality, of non-existence, fell upon her.
Could it be she ?--she indeed--who had gone there the year before the gladdest thing that the earth bore, with no care except to shelter her flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest blossoms for the burgomaster's housewife?
She did not think thus to herself; but a vague doubt that she could ever have been the little gay, laborious, happy Bebee, with troops of friends and endless joys for every day that dawned, came over her as she went by the black front of the Broodhuis.
The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit girl, jarred on her as she passed the stall under its yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening wind.
"Oh he, little fool," the mocking voice cried, "the rind of the fine pine is full of prickles, and stings the lips when the taste is gone ?--to be sure--crack common nuts like me and you are never wanting--hazels grow free in every copse.

Prut, tut! your grand lover lies a-dying; so the students read out of this just now; and you such a simpleton as not to get a roll of napoleons out of him before he went to rot in Paris.

I dare say he was poor as sparrows, if one knew the truth.

He was only a painter after all." Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in which she was wrapping gentians: it was a piece of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it there was a single line or so which said that the artist Flamen, whose Gretchen was the wonder of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in his rooms in Paris.
Bebee stood and read; the strong ruddy western light upon the type, the taunting laughter of the fruit girl on her ear.
A bitter shriek rang from her that made even the cruelty of Lisa's mirth stop in a sudden terror.
She stood staring like a thing changed to stone down on the one name that to her rilled all the universe.
"Ill--he is ill--do you hear ?" she echoed piteously, looking at Lisa; "and you say he is poor ?" "Poor?
for sure! is he not a painter ?" said the fruit girl, roughly.