Beautiful things:  things fantastic, ignorant, absurd, very simple, very unreasonable oftentimes, but things beautiful always, and sometimes even very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a certain light divine that does shine now and then as through an alabaster lamp, through minds that have no grossness to obscure them.

Her words were not equal to the burden of her thoughts at times, but he knew how to take the pearl of the thought from the broken shell and tangled sea-weed of her simple, untutored speech.

“If there be a God anywhere,” he thought to himself, “this little Fleming is very near him.”

She was so near that, although he had no belief in any God, he could not deal with her as he had used to do with the work-girls in the primrose paths of old Vincennes.

CHAPTER XVI.

“To be Gretchen, you must count the leaves of your daisies,” he said to her, as he painted,—­painted her just as she was, with her two little white feet in the wooden shoes, and the thick green leaves behind; the simplest picture possible, the dress of gray—­only cool dark gray—­with white linen bodice, and no color anywhere except in the green of the foliage; but where he meant the wonder and the charm of it to lie was in the upraised, serious, child-like face, and the gaze of the grave, smiling eyes.

It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open air among the flowers.  Gretchen, with the tall dog-daisies growing up about her feet, among the thyme and the roses, before she had had need to gather, one to ask her future of its parted leaves.

The Gretchen of Scheffer tells no tale; she is a fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded peasant, with whom neither angels nor devils have anything to do, and whose eyes never can open to either hell or heaven.  But the Gretchen of Flamen said much more than this:  looking at it, men would sigh from shame, and women weep from sorrow.

“Count the daisies?” echoed Bebee.  “Oh, I know what you mean.  A little—­much—­passionately—­until death—­not at all.  What the girls say when they want to see if any one loves them?  Is that it?”

She looked at him without any consciousness, except as she loved the flowers.

“Do you think the daisies know?” she went on, seriously, parting their petals with her fingers.  “Flowers do know many things—­that is certain.”

“Ask them for yourself.”

“Ask them what?”

“How much—­any one—­loves you?”

“Oh, but every one loves me; there is no one that is bad.  Antoine used to say to me.  ’Never think of yourself, Bebee; always think of other people, so every one will love you.’  And I always try to do that, and every one does.”

“But that is not the love the daisy tells of to your sex.”

“No?”

“No; the girls that you see count the flowers—­they are thinking, not of all the village, but of some one unlike all the rest, whose shadow falls across theirs in the moonlight!  You know that?”