“Leave the child alone, you mischievous one,” said they.  “Be content with being base yourself.  Look you, Lisette; she is not one like you to make eyes at the law students, and pester the painter lads for a day’s outing.  Let her be, or we will tell your mother how you leave the fruit for the gutter children to pick and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairs into that young French fellow’s chamber.  Oh, oh! a fine beating you will get when she knows!”

Lisette’s mother was a fierce and strong old Brabantoise who exacted heavy reckoning with her daughter for every single plum and peach that she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit shop to be sunned in the streets, and under the students’ love-glances.

So the girl took heed, and left Bebee alone.

“What should I want her to come with us for?” she reasoned with herself.  “She is twice as pretty as I am; Jules might take to her instead—­who knows?”

So that she was at once savage and yet triumphant when she saw, as she thought, Bebee drifting down the high flood of temptation.

“Oh, oh, you dainty one!” she cried one day to her.  “So you would not take the nuts and mulberries that do for us common folk, because you had a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses!  That was all, was it?  Eh, well; I do not begrudge you.  Only take care; remember, the nuts and mulberries last through summer and autumn, and there are heaps of them on every fair-stall and street corner; but the pine, that is eaten in a day, one springtime, and its like does not grow in the hedges.  You will have your mouth full of sugar an hour,—­and then, eh!—­you will go famished all the year.”

“I do not understand,” said Bebee, looking up, with her thoughts far away, and scarcely hearing the words spoken to her.

“Oh, pretty little fool! you understand well enough,” said Lisette, grinning, as she rubbed up a melon.  “Does he give you fine things?  You might let me see.”

“No one gives me anything.”

“Chut! you want me to believe that.  Why Jules is only a lad, and his father is a silk mercer, 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.