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"I will wait and paint the Broodhuis." "So many people do that; you are a painter then?" "Yes in a way." He sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread his things there, and sketched, whilst the traffic went on around them.
That Bébée did not know, but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis, selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noonday like any other market girl, but at times glancing up to the stately towers and the blue sky, with a look on her face that made the old tinker and cobbler whisper together, "What does she see there? the dead people or the angels?"
Then people who had loved her, hearing, came up the green lanes from the city the cobbler and the tinman, and the old woman who sold saints' pictures by the Broodhuis. The Varnhart children hung about the garden wicket, frightened and sobbing. Old Jehan beat his knees with his hands, and said only over and over again, "Another dead another dead! the red mill and I see them all dead!"
Her voice shook a little as she tied up a bunch of mignonette and told the price of it. Those beautiful stockings! why had she ever seen them, and why had he told her a lie? It made her heart heavy. For the first time in her brief life the Broodhuis seemed to frown between her and the sun. Undisturbed, he painted on and did not look at her. The day was nearly done. The people began to scatter.
He listened with a smile; it was not new to him; he knew her heart much better than she knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness, and yet a strength, in the words that touched him though. He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told her to leave off her spinning. "Some day I shall paint you with that wheel as I painted the Broodhuis. Will you let me, Bébée?" "Yes."
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.
She did not think thus to herself; but a vague doubt that she could ever have been the little gay, laborious, happy Bébée, with troops of friends and endless joys for every day that dawned, came over her as she went by the black front of the Broodhuis.
Bébée stood and looked from the box to the Broodhuis, from the Broodhuis to the box; she glanced around, but no one had come there so early as she, except the tinker, who was busy quarrelling with his wife and letting his smelting fire burn a hole in his breeches. "The box was certainly for her, since it was set upon her chair?" Bébée pondered a moment; then little by little opened the lid.
Gudule, that his mother had burned many a candle before its altars for a dead brother who had been drowned off the dunes. But the child's mind, unled, but not misled, had pondered on these things, and her heart had grown to love them; and perhaps no student of Spanish architecture, no antiquary of Moyen-âge relics, loved St. Gudule and the Broodhuis as little ignorant Bébée did.
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