that is untrue. I will do all, just as I have
done, and more too, if only you will give me things to read, for I do
think when one is happy, one ought to work more--not less."

"But will these books make you happy? If you ask me the truth, I must
tell you--no. You are happy as you are, because you know nothing else
than your own little life; for ignorance _is_ happiness, Bebee, let
sages, ancient and modern, say what they will. But when you know a
little, you will want to know more: and when you know much, you will want
to see much also, and then--and then--the thing will grow--you will be no
longer content. That is, you will be unhappy."

Bebee watched him with wistful eyes.

"Perhaps that is true. No doubt it is true, if you say it. But you know
all the world seems full of voices that I hear, but that I cannot
understand; it is with me as I should think it is with people who go to
foreign countries and do not know the tongue that is spoken when they
land; and it makes me unhappy, because I cannot comprehend, and so the
books will not make me more so, but less. And as for being content--when
I thought you were gone away out of the city, last night, I thought
I would never be able to pray any more, because I hated myself, and I
almost hated the angels, and I told Mary that she was cruel, and she
turned her face from me--as it seemed, forever."

She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning as she spoke, and looking
across at him with earnest eyes, that begged him to believe her. She was
saying the pure truth, but she did not know the force or the meaning of
that truth.

He listened with a smile; it was not new to him; he knew her heart much
better than she knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness, and
yet a strength, in the words that touched him though.

He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told her to leave off her
spinning.

"Some day I shall paint you with that wheel as I painted the Broodhuis.
Will you let me, Bebee?"

"Yes."

She answered him as she would have answered if he had told her to go on
pilgrimage from one end of the Low Countries to the other.

"What were you going to do to-day?"

"I am going into the market with the flowers; I go every day."

"How much will you make?"

"Two or three francs, if I am lucky."

"And do you never have a holiday?"

"Oh, yes; but not often, you know, because it is on the fete days that
the people want the most flowers."

"But in the winter?"