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, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the main chance.

“Nothing,” Bebee would answer, with a quick color in her face; and they would reply in contemptuous reproof, “Careless little fool; you should make enough to buy you wood all winter.  When the man from Ghent painted Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing still so long in the clover.  The Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if it be the cow that makes the difference.”

Bebee was silent, weeding her carnation bed;—­what could she tell them that they would understand?

She seemed so far away from them all—­those good friends of her childhood—­now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened to her sight.

She lived in a dream.

Whether she sat in the market place taking copper coins, or in the moonlight with a book on her knees, it was all the same.  Her feet ran, her tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not neglect her goat or her garden, she did not forsake her house labor or her good deeds to old Annemie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt one touch, she only saw one face.

Here and there—­one in a million—­there is a female thing that can love like this, once and forever.

Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the Mater Dolorosa.

He had something nearer akin to affection for her than he had ever had in his life for anything, but he was never in love with her—­no more in love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in his breast.  Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch her changes from shyness to confidence, and from frankness again into fear, was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.