stockings--such beautiful stockings! Silk ones! Is it not very odd?"

"It is more odd they should have forgotten you so long. May I see them?"

"I cannot show them to you now. Those ladies are going to buy. But you
can see them later--if you wait."

"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. He was very many years
older than she; handsome, with a dark, and changeful, and listless face;
he wore brown velvet, and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a
little as Egmont might have done when wooing Claire.

Bébée, as she sold the flowers and took the change fifty times in the
hour, glanced at him now and then, and watched the movements of his
hands, she could not have told why.

Always among men and women, always in the crowds of the streets, people
were nothing to her; she went through them as through a field of standing
corn,--only in the field she would have tarried for poppies, and in the
town she tarried for no one.

She dealt with men as with women, simply, truthfully, frankly, with the
innocent fearlessness of a child. When they told her she was pretty, she