"It is you!" she said, with a little cry, as she saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning on a gate midway in the green and solitary road that leads to Laeken.
"Yes, it is I," he answered, as he joined her. "Have you forgiven me,
Bébée?"
She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes, like those of a child in fault.
"Oh, I did not sleep all night!" she said, simply. "I thought I had been rude and ungrateful, and I could not be sure I had done right, though to have done otherwise would certainly have been wrong."
He laughed.
"Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to be drawn from most moral uncertainties. Do not think twice about the matter, my dear. I have not, I assure you."
"No!"
She was a little disappointed. It seemed such an immense thing to her; and she had lain awake all the night, turning it about in her little brain, and appealing vainly for help in it to the sixteen sleep-angels.
"No, indeed. And where are you going so fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were sandals of Mercury?"
"Mercury—is that a shoemaker?"