ens' 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 Arenenberg, 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 now-a-days.' 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 Bebee, simply. "I should like to see it--just to see it, as
one looks through a grating into the king's grapehouses 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 Annemie? I could not anyhow, anywhere be any happier than I
am. There is only one thing I wish."

"And what is that?"

"To know something. Not to be so ignorant. Just look--I can read a
little, it is true; my hours, and the letters, and when Krebs brings in
a newspaper I can read a little of it--not much. I know French well,
because Antoine was French himself, and never did talk Flemish to me;
and they, being Flemish, cannot, of course, read the newspapers at all,
and so think it very wonderful indeed in me. But what I want is to know
things, to know all abou