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.
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.