"Of the people that live in the gold frames," said Bébée, quite
seriously. "In the galleries, you know. I know a charwoman that scrubs
the floors of the Arenberg Palace, and she lets me in sometimes to look;
and you are just like those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you
have not a hawk and a sword, and they always have. I used to wonder where
they came from, for they are not like any of us one bit, and the
charwoman--she is Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot
d'Etain--always said. 'Dear heart, they all belong to Rubes' land: we
never see their like nowadays.' But _you_ must come out of Rubes' land;
at least, I think so, do you not?"

He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was the homely abbreviation of
Rubens that all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that was
reality to this little lonely fanciful mind.

"Perhaps I do," he answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his
while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to
her. "Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little one? To see the gold
and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all?--never to toil or get
tired?--always to move in a pageant?--always to live like the hawks in
the paintings you talk of, with silver bells hung round you, and a hood
all sewn with pearls?"

"No," said Bébée, simply. "I should like to see it, just to see it, as
one looks through a grating into the king's grape-houses here. But I
should not like to live in it. I love my hut, and the starling, and the
chickens, and what would the garden do without me? and the children, and
the old Annémie? I could not anyhow, anywhere, be any happier than I am.
There is only one thing I wish."