one of those ships may bring him aboard of her, and he may leap out on the wharf there, and come running up the stairs as he used to do, and cry, in his merry voice, ’Annemie, Annemie, here is more flax to spin, here is more hose to weave!’ For that was always his homeward word; no matter whether he had had fair weather or foul, he always knotted the flax to his masthead.  So you see, dear, I could not leave here.  For what if he came and found me away?  He would say it was an odd fashion of mourning for him.  And I could not do without the window, you know.  I can watch all the brigs come in; and I can smell the shipping smell that I have loved all the days of my life; and I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and furling, and mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their flags up and down.  And then who can say?—­the sea never took him, I think—­I think I shall hear his voice before I die.  For they do say that God is good.”

Bebee, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and her eyes grew wistful and wondering.  She had heard the story a thousand times; always in different words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annemie was deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all the whiteness of her hair and all the wrinkles of her face, and only thought of her sea-slain lover as he had been in the days of her youth.

But this afternoon the familiar history had a new patheticalness for her, and as the old soul put aside with her palsied hand the square of canvas that screened the casement, and looked out, with her old dim sad eyes strained in the longing that God never answered, Bebee felt a strange chill at her own heart, and wondered to herself,—­

“What can it be to care for another creature like that?  It must be so terrible, and yet it must be beautiful too.  Does every one suffer like that?”

She did not speak at all as she finished sweeping the bricks, and went down-stairs for a metal cruche full of water, and set over a little charcoal on the stove the old woman’s brass soup kettle with her supper of stewing cabbage.

Annemie did not hear or notice; she was still looking out of the hole in the wall on to the masts, and the sails, and the water.

It was twilight.

From the barges and brigs there came the smell of the sea.  The sailors were shouting to each other.  The craft were crowded close, and lost in the growing darkness.  On the other side of the canal the belfries were ringing for vespers.

“Eleven voyages one and another, and he never forgot to tie the flax to the mast,” Annemie 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.”