Somehow the day
seemed dull, and the square empty.
The stones and the timbers around seemed more than ever full of a
thousand stories that they would not tell her because she knew nothing,
and was only Bebee.
She had never known a dull hour before. She, a little bright,
industrious, gay thing, whose hands were always full of work, and whose
head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when
she wove the lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with the frost on the
casements, and the mice running out in their hunger over the bare brick
floor.
That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would
bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women
sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the
children dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they had come out
without a crust to break their fast.
She had been sad there often for others, but she had never been dull--not
with this unfamiliar, desolate, dreary dulness, that seemed to take all
the mirth out of the busy life around her, and all the color out of the
blue sky above.
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