He looked down on her with a smile that had a certain pity in it.

“Well, yes; there are women like that, I believe.  But be very sure, my dear, he beat her.  Of the two, one always holds the whip and uses it, the other crouches.”

“I do not understand,” said Bebee.

“No; but you will.”

“I will?—­when?”

He smiled again.

“Oh—­to-morrow, perhaps, or next year—­or when Fate fancies.”

“Or rather, when I choose,” he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest with a certain pleasure on the little feet, that went beside him in the grass, and the pretty fair bosom that showed ever and again, as the frills of her linen bodice were blown back by the wind and her own quick motion.

Bebee looked also up at him; he was very handsome, and looked so to her, after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Walloon peasantry around her.  He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets, he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep brown waters, and a face like one of Jordaens’ or Rembrandt’s cavaliers in the galleries where she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the paintings, and dream of what that world could be in which those people had lived.

“You are of the people of Rubes’ country, are you not?” she asked him.

“Of what country, my dear?”

“Of the people that live in the gold frames,” said Bebee, quite seriously.  “In the galleries, you know.  I know a charwoman that scrubs the floors of the Arenberg Palace, and she lets me in sometimes to look; and you are just like those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you have not a hawk and a sword, and they always have.  I used to wonder where they came from, for they are not like any of us one bit, and the charwoman—­she is Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot d’Etain—­always said.  ‘Dear heart, they all belong to Rubes’ land:  we never see their like nowadays.’  But you must come out of Rubes’ land; at least, I think so, do you not?”

He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was the homely abbreviation of Rubens that all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that was reality to this little lonely fanciful mind.

“Perhaps I do,” he answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to her.  “Do you not want to see Rubes’ world, little one?  To see the gold and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all?—­never to toil or get tired?—­always to move in a pageant?—­always to live like the hawks in the paintings you talk of, with silver bells hung round you, and a hood all sewn with pearls?”

“No,” said Bebee, simply.  “I should like to see it, just to see it, as one looks through a grating into the king’s grape-houses here.  But I should not like to live in it.  I love my hut, and the starling, and the chickens, and what would the garden do without me? and the children, and the old Annemie?  I could not anyhow, anywhere, be any happier than I am.  There is only one thing I wish.”