The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mère 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 Bébée'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, Bébée?" they used to ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the main chance.
"Nothing," Bébée 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."
Bébée 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 Annémie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt one touch, she only saw one face.