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She stood quite still, her face perfectly impassive, her little hands clasped together, the brim of her hat shading her eyes, which looked straight at my canvas.

I gave no sign of her presence. It is dangerous to break down the reserve of silence, which is often the only barrier between an out-door painter and the crowds that surround him. Persisted in, it not only compels their respect, even to the lowering of their voices and the tip-toeing in and out of the circle about you, but shortens the time of their visits, a consummation devoutly to be wished. So I worked on in silence, never turning toward this embodiment of one of Boutet do Monvel’s drawings, whose absorbed face I could see out of one corner of my eye.

Then a ripple of laughter broke the stillness, and a little finger was thrust out, stopping within a hair’s-breadth of the dot of Chinese white, still wet, which topped my burnt-umber figure.

“Tres drole, Monsieur!”

The voice was sweeter than the laugh. One of those flute-like, bird-throated voices that children often have who live in the open all their lives, chasing butterflies or gathering wild flowers.

Then came a halloo from the greensward. The priest was coming toward us, calling out, as he walked:

“Susette! Susette!”

He, too, underwent a change. The long, ivory-black cassock, so unmistakable in the atmospheric perspective, became an ordinary frock-coat; the white band of a collar developed into the regulation secular pattern, and the silk hat, although of last year’s shape, conformed less closely in its lines to one belonging exclusively to the clergy. The face, though, as I could see in my hurried glance, and even at that distance, was the smooth, clean-shaven face of a priest–the face of a man of fifty, I should think, who had spent all his life in the service of others.

Again came the voice, this time quite near.

“Susette! Susette!”

The child, without turning her head, waved her hand in reply, looked earnestly into my face, and with a quick bending of one knee in courtesy, and a “Merci, M’sieu; merci,” ran with all her speed toward the priest, who stretched wide his arms, half-lifting her from the ground in the embrace. Then a smile broke over his face, so joyous, so full of love and tenderness, so much the unconscious index of the heart that prompted it, that I laid down my palette to watch them.

I have known many priests in my time, and I have never ceased to marvel at the beauty of the tie which binds them to the little ones of their flocks. I have never been in a land where priests and children were not companions. These long-frocked guardians sit beside their playgrounds, with noses in their breviaries, or they head processions of boys and girls on the way to chapel, or they follow, two by two, behind a long string of blue-checked aprons and severe felt hats, the uniform of the motherless; or they teach the little vagrants by the hour–often it is the only schooling that these children get.

But I never remember one of them carrying such a waif about in his arms, nor one irradiated by such a flash of heavenly joy when some child, in a mad frolic, saw fit to scrape her muddy shoes down the front of his clean, black cassock.

The beatific smile itself was not altogether new to me. Anyone else can see it who wanders into the Gallery of the Prado. It irradiates the face of an old saint by Ribera–a study for one of his large canvases, and is hung above the line. I used to stand before it for hours, studying the technique. The high lights on the face are cracked in places, and the shadows are blackened by time, but the expression is that of one who looks straight up into heaven. And there is another–a Correggio, in the Hermitage, a St. Simon or St. Timothy, or some other old fellow–whose eyes run tears of joy, and whose upturned face reflects the light of the sun. Yet there was something in the face of the priest before me that neither of the others had–a peculiar human quality, which shone out of his eyes, as he stood bareheaded in the sunshine, the little girl in his arms. If the child had been his daughter–his very own and all he had, and if he had caught her safe from some danger that threatened her life, it could not have expressed more clearly the joyousness of gratitude or the bliss inspired by the sense of possessing something so priceless that every other emotion was absorbed.