He was silent.

"You are a good little girl, Bebee, I can see." he said at last, with a
graver sound in his voice. "And who is this Annemie for whom you do so
much? an old woman, I suppose."

"Oh, yes, quite old; incredibly old. Her man was drowned at sea sixty
years ago, and she watches for his brig still, night and morning."

"The dog's heart. No doubt he beat her, and had a wife in fifty other
ports."

"Oh, no!" said Bebee, with a little cry, as though the word against the
dead man hurt her. "She has told me so much of him. He was as good as
good could be, and loved her so, and between the voyages they were so
happy. Surely that must have been sixty years now, and she is so sorry
still, and still will not believe that he was drowned."

He looked down on her with a smile that had a certain pity in it.

"Well, yes; there are women like that, I believe. But be very sure, my
dear, he beat her. Of the two, one always holds the whip and uses it, the
other crouches."

"I do not understand," said Bebee.

"No; but you will."

"I will?--when?"

He smiled again.

"Oh--to-morrow, perhaps, or next year--or when Fate fancies."

"Or rather, when I choose," he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest
with a certain pleasure on the little feet, that went beside him in the
grass, and the pretty fair bosom that showed ever and again, as the
frills of her linen bodice were blown back by the wind and her own quick
motion.

Bebee looked also up at him; he was very handsome, and looked so to her,
after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Walloon peasantry
around her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like
velvets, he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep brown waters,
and a face like one of Jordaens' or Rembrandt's cavaliers in the
galleries where she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the
paintings, and dream of what that world could be in which those people
had lived.

"_You_ are of the people of Rubes' country, are you not?" she asked him.

"Of what country, my dear?"

"Of the people that live in the gold frames," said Bebee, 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