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 Bébée, 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 Bébée 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 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.