He spoke to her rarely, and sketched on and on in rapid bold strokes the quaint graces and massive richness of the Maison du Roi.

There is no crowd so busy in Brabant that it will not find leisure to stare.  The Fleming or the Walloon has nothing of the Frenchman’s courtesy; he is rough and rude; he remains a peasant even when town bred, and the surly insolence of the “Gueux” is in him still.  He is kindly to his fellows, though not to beasts; he is shrewd, patient, thrifty, industrious, and good in very many ways, but civil never.

A good score of them left off their occupations and clustered round the painter, staring, chattering, pushing, pointing, as though a brush had never been seen in all the land of Rubens.

Bebee, ashamed of her people, got up from her chair and rebuked them.

“Oh, men of Brussels; fie then for shame!” she called to them as clearly as a robin sings.  “Did never you see a drawing before? and are there not saints and martyrs enough to look at in the galleries? and have you never some better thing to do than to gape wide-mouthed at a stranger?  What laziness—­ah!  Just worthy of a people who sleep and smoke while their dogs work for them!  Go away, all of you; look, there comes the gendarme—­it will be the worse for you.  Sir, sit under my stall; they will not dare trouble you then.”

He moved under the awning, thanking her with a smile; and the people, laughing, shuffled unwillingly aside and let him paint on in peace.  It was only little Bebee, but they had spoilt the child from her infancy, and were used to obey her.

The painter took a long time.  He set about it with the bold ease of one used to all the intricacies of form and color, and he had the skill of a master.  But he spent more than half the time looking idly at the humors of the populace or watching how the treasures of Bebee’s garden went away one by one in the hands of strangers.

Meanwhile, ever and again, sitting on the edge of her stall, with his colors and brushes tossed out on the board, he talked to her, and, with the soft imperceptible skill of long practice in those arts, he drew out the details of her little simple life.

There were not always people to buy, and whilst she rested and sheltered the flowers from the sun, she answered him willingly, and in one of her longer rests showed him the wonderful stockings.

“Do you think it could be the fairies?” she asked him a little doubtfully.

It was easy to make her believe any fantastical nonsense; but her fairies were ethereal divinities.  She could scarcely believe that they had laid that box on her chair.

“Impossible to doubt it!” he replied, unhesitatingly.  “Given a belief in fairies at all, why should there be any limit to what they can do?  It is the same with the saints, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Bebee, thoughtfully.

The saints were mixed up in her imagination with the fairies in an intricacy that would have defied the best reasonings of Father Francis.