could paint as never before. I feel it. The very pain will help me. If only I had the colours!"

"There are always colours," said the Bee-woman, "if not of one kind, then of another. But you cannot get them for nothing."

"I will pay any price," she said.

"Will you take the crimson from the blood of your cheeks?" said the Bee-woman. "Will you take the fresh blue from your[Pg 27] eyes, the ivory white from your teeth, the ruddy gold from your hair, and the thick softness of it for brushes? Will you?"

[Pg 27]

She shuddered.

"I know what you mean," she said, "but oh, it is hard! I—I cannot."

"Then you are a fool," said the Bee-woman quietly. "There is no man living who would not give all that and give it with a smile, for his work. You are not a great artist."

She wrung her hands.

"You are right, you are right," she moaned, "and I am not worthy. If colours are my weapons to win fame, how should I grudge them? I will give them up."

"Then indeed you are a fool," said the Bee-woman sternly, "for you throw away your most powerful weapon before the fight begins. You are not a great woman."

She fell with her face to the earthen floor and lay quiet, while the bees hummed outside the hut like the turning of a great wheel or the rocking of an old cradle.

[Pg 28]"Then all that I have learned," she muttered at last, "is useless? All that I have worked and anguished for? All that I have saved even my suffering for, prizing it and never grudging, because it would help my work? No man could do more."

[Pg 28]

"You think so?" said the Bee-woman. "Get up, my child, and look out of the latticed window at the back of my cottage. Do not think what you see there is close before you, for the glass of that window has strange properties and the part of the wood which it shows you is far, far from here."

She raised herself and walked to the casement, shading her eyes with her hand, for a red glow 

 Prev. P 12/54 next