BÉBÉE

CHAPTER I.


Bébée sprang out of bed at daybreak. She was sixteen.

It seemed a very wonderful thing to be as much as that--sixteen--a woman
quite.

A cock was crowing under her lattice. He said how old you are!--how old
you are! every time that he sounded his clarion.

She opened the lattice and wished him good day, with a laugh. It was so
pleasant to be woke by him, and to think that no one in all the world
could ever call one a child any more.

There was a kid bleating in the shed. There was a thrush singing in the
dusk of the sycamore leaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother away
there beyond the fence. There were dreamy muffled bells ringing in the
distance from many steeples and belfries where the city was; they all
said one thing, "How good it is to be so old as that--how good, how very
good!"

Bébée was very pretty.

No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To look at her it seemed as if
she had so lived among the flowers that she had grown like them, and only
looked a bigger blossom--that was all.

She wore two little wooden shoes and a little cotton cap, and a gray
kirtle--linen in summer, serge in winter; but the little feet in the
shoes were like rose leaves, and the cap was as white as a lily, and the
gray kirtle was like the bark of the bough that the apple-blossom parts,
and peeps out of, to blush in the sun.

The flowers had been the only godmothers that she had ever had, and fairy
godmothers too.