rcer, and only gives him a hundred francs a month,
but Jules buys me all I want--somehow--or do you think I would take
the trouble to set my cap straight when he goes by? He gave me these
ear-rings, look. I wish you would let me see what you get."

But Bebee had gone away--unheeding--dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne
d'Arc, of whom he had told her tales.

He made sketches of her sometimes, but seldom pleased himself.

It was not so easy as he had imagined that it would prove to portray this
little flower-like face, with the clear eyes and the child's open brow.
He who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had got a taint on his
brush--he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn--he who had always
painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that if
he could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bebee's face he would
get what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. You shall paint a
gold and glistening brocade, or a fan of peacock's feathers, to
perfection, and yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little
field daisy shall baffle and escape you.

He felt, too, that he must catch her expression flying as he would do the
flash of a swallow's wing across a blue sky; he knew that Bebee, forced
to studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer the ideal that he
wanted.

More than once he came and filled in more fully his various designs in
the little hut garden, among the sweet gray lavender and the golden disks
of the sunflowers; and more than once Bebee was missed from her place in
the front of the Broodhuis.

The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at the
wicket, and Mere Krebs would shake her head as she went by on her
sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head would be turned by
vanity; and old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer through the
sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could make
Bebee's face beam over again upon that panel of wood could not give him
back his dead daughter who had been pushed away under the black earth so
long, long before, when the red mill had been brave and new, the red mill
that the boys and girls called old.

But except these, no one noticed much.

Painters were no rare sights in Brabant.

The people were used to see them coming and going, making pictures of mud
and stones, and ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly things.

"What does he pay you, Bebee?" they used to ask,