midnight
`` You are tired , I am sure you must be tired , '' she said , pulling her little bed forward for him to sit on , for there were only two wooden stools in the hut , and no chair at all . Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes from his hand , and would have kneeled and taken the dust off his boots if he would have let her ; and went hither and thither gladly and lightly , bringing him a wooden bowl of milk and the rest of the slender fare , and cutting as quick as thought fresh cresses and lettuce from her garden , and bringing him , as the crown of all , Father Francis 's honey-comb on vine-leaves , with some pretty sprays of box and mignonette scattered about it -- doing all this with a swift , sweet grace that robbed the labor of all look of servitude , and looking at him ever and again with a smile that said as clearly as any words , `` I can not do much , but what I do , I do with all my heart . '' There was something in the sight of her going and coming in those simple household errands , across the sunlit floor , that moved him as some mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her cows to pasture may move a listener who indifferent has heard the swell of the organ of La Hague , or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo . The gray lavender blowing at the house door has its charm for those who are tired of the camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of midnight suppers . This man was not good . He was idle and vain , and amorous and cold , and had been spoiled by the world in which he had passed his days ; but he had the temper of an artist : he had something , too , of a poet 's fancy ; he was vaguely touched and won by this simple soul that looked at him out of Bébée 's eyes with some look that in all its simplicity had a divine gleam in it that made him half ashamed . He had known women by the thousand , good women and bad ; women whom he had dealt ill with and women who had dealt ill with him ; but this he had not known -- this frank , fearless , tender , gay , grave , innocent , industrious little life , helping itself , feeding itself , defending itself , working for itself and for others , and vaguely seeking all the while some unseen light , some unknown god , with a blind faith so infinitely ignorant and yet so infinitely pathetic .