Mortimer Romer could not be called a many-sided man. His dominant lust for power filled his life so completely that he had little room for excursions into the worlds of art or literature. He was, however, by no means narrow or stupid in these matters. He had at least the shrewdness to recognize the depth of their influence over other people. Indeed, as he was so constantly occupied with this very question of influence, with the problem of what precise motives and impulses did actually stir and drive the average mass of humanity, it was natural that he should, sooner or later, have to assume some kind of definite attitude towards these things. The attitude he finally hit upon, as most harmonious with his temperament, was that of active and genial patronage combined with a modest denial of the possession of any personal knowledge or taste. He recognized that an occasion might easily arise, when some association with the Æsthetic world, even of this modest and external kind, might prove extremely useful to him. He might find it advisable to make use of these alien forces, just as Napoleon found it necessary to make use of religion. The fact that he himself was devoid of ideal emotions, whether religious or Æsthetic, mattered nothing. Only fools confined their psychological interest within the narrow limits of their subjective tastes. Humanity was influenced by these things, and Romer was concerned with influencing humanity. Not that these deviations into artistic by-paths carried him very far. He would invite “cultivated” people to stay with him in his noble House—at least they would appreciate that!—and then hand them over to the care of his charming daughter, a method of hospitality which, it must be confessed, seemed to meet with complete approval on the part of those concerned. Thus the name of the owner of Leo’s Hill came to be associated, in many artistic and literary circles, with the names of such admirable and friendly patrons of these pursuits, as could be counted upon for practical and efficient, if not for intellectual aid, in the contest with an unsympathetic and materialistic world. It was not perhaps the more struggling and less prosperous artists who found him their friend. To most of these his attitude, though kind and attentive, was hardly cordial. He knew too little of the questions at issue, to risk giving his support to the Pariahs and Anarchists of Art. It was among the well-known and the successful that Mr. Romer’s patronage was most evident. Success was a quality he admired in every field; and while, as has been hinted, his personal taste remained quite untouched, he was clever enough to pick up the more fashionable catch-words of current criticism, and to use them, when occasion served, with effective naturalness and apparent conviction.

Among other celebrities or semi-celebrities, across whose track he came, while on his periodic visits to London, was a certain Ralph Dangelis, an American artist, whose masterly and audacious work was just then coming into vogue. True to his imperial instinct of surrounding himself with brilliant and prosperous clients, if such they could be called, he promptly invited the famous Westerner to come down and stay with him in Nevilton.

The American, who knew nothing of English country life, and was an impassioned and desperate pursuer of all new experiences, accepted this invitation, and appeared, among the quiet Somersetshire orchards, like a bolt from the blue; falling into the very centre of the small quaintly involved drama, whose acts and scenes we are now recording. Thus plunged into a completely new circle the distinguished adventurer very soon made himself most felicitously at home. He was of a frank and friendly disposition; at heart an obdurate and impenetrable egoist, but on the surface affable and kind to a quite exceptional degree. He had spent several years in both Paris and Rome, and hence it was in his power to adapt himself easily and naturally to European, if not to English ways. One result of his protracted visits to foreign cities was the faculty of casting off at pleasure his native accent—the accent of a citizen of Toledo, Ohio. He did not always do this. Sometimes it was his humour, especially in intercourse with ladies, to revert to most free and fearless provincialisms, and a certain boyish gaiety in him made him mischievously addicted to use such expressions when they seemed least of all acceptable, but under normal conditions it would have been difficult to gather from the tone of his language that he was anything but an extremely well-travelled gentleman of Anglo-Saxon birth. He speedily made a fast friend of Gladys, who found his airy persiflage and elaborate courtesy eminently to her liking; and as the long summer days succeeded one another and brought the visitor into more and more familiar relation with Nevilton ways and customs, it seemed as though his sojourn in that peaceful retreat was likely to be indefinitely prolonged. It may be well believed that their guest’s attraction to Gladys did not escape the notice of the girl’s parents. Mr. Romer took the trouble to make sundry investigations as to the status of Mr. Dangelis in his native Ohio; and it was with unmixed satisfaction that both he and his wife received the intelligence that he was the son and the only son of one of Toledo’s most “prominent” citizens, a gentleman actively and effectively engaged in furthering the progress of civilization by the manufacturing of automobiles. Dangelis was, indeed, a prospective, if not an actual, millionaire, and, from all that could be learned, it appeared that the prominent citizen of Toledo handed over to his son an annual allowance equal to the income of many crowned heads.

The Pariah of Nevilton House—the luckless child of the Apennines—found little to admire in this energetic wanderer. His oratorical manner, his abrupt, aggressive courtesies, his exuberant high spirits, the sweep and swing of his vigorous personality, the extraordinary mixture in him of pedantry and gaiety, jarred upon her sensitive over-strung nerves. In his boyish desire to please her, hearing that she came from Italy, the good-natured artist would frequently turn the conversation round to the beauty and romance of that “garden of the world,” as he was pleased to style her home; but the tone of these discourses increased rather than diminished Lacrima’s obstinate reserve. He had a habit of referring to her country as if it were a place whose inhabitants only existed, by a considerate dispensation of Providence, to furnish a charming background for certain invaluable relics of antiquity. These precious fragments, according to this easy view of things, appeared to survive, together with their appropriate guardians, solely with the object of enlarging and inspiring the voracious “mentality” of wayfarers from London and New York. Grateful as Lacrima was for the respite the artist brought her from the despotism of her cousin, she could not bring herself to regard him, so far as she herself was concerned, with anything but extreme reserve and caution.

One peculiarity he displayed, filled her with shy dismay. Dangelis had a trick of staring at the people with whom he associated, as if with a kind of quizzical analysis. He threw her into a turmoil of wretched embarrassment by some of his glances. She was troubled and frightened, without being able to get at the secret of her agitation. Sometimes she fancied that he was wondering what he could make of her as a model. The idea that anything of this kind should be expected of her filled her with nervous dread. At other times the wild idea passed through her brain that he was making covert overtures to her, of an amorous character. She thought she intercepted once or twice a look upon his face of the particular kind which always filled her with shrinking apprehension. This illusion—if it were an illusion—was far more alarming than any tendency he might display to pounce on her for Æsthetic purposes; for the Pariah’s association with the inhabitants of Nevilton House had not given her a pleasing impression of human amorousness.

Shortly after Dangelis’ arrival, Mr. Romer found it necessary to visit London again for a few days; and the artist was rather relieved than otherwise by his departure. He felt freer, and more at liberty to express his ideas, when left alone with the three women. For himself, however varied their attitude to him might be, he found them all, in their different ways, full of stimulating interest. With Mrs. Romer he soon became perfectly at home; and discovered a mischievous and profane pleasure in the process of exciting and encouraging all her least lady-like characteristics. He would follow her into the spacious Nevilton kitchens, where the good lady was much more at home than in her stately drawing room; and watch with unconventional interest her rambling domestic colloquies with Mrs. Murphy the housekeeper, Jane the cook, and Lily the house-maid.

The men-servants, of whom Mr. Romer kept two, always avoided, with scrupulous refinement, these unusual gatherings. They discoursed, in the pantry, upon their mistress’ dubious behavior, and came to the conclusion that she was no more of a “real lady” than her visitor from America was a “real gentleman.”

Dangelis made some new and amazing discovery in Susan Romer’s character every day. In all his experiences from San Francisco to New York, and from Paris to Vienna, he had never encountered anything in the least resembling her.

He could never make out how deep her apparent simplicity went, nor how ingrained and innate was her lethargic submission to circumstances. Nothing in the woman shocked him; neither her vulgarity nor her grossness. And as for her sly, sleepy, feline malice, he loved to excite and provoke it, as he would have loved to have excited a slumbering animal in a cage. He delighted in the way she wrinkled up her eyes. He delighted in the way she smacked her lips over her food. He loved watching her settling herself to sleep in her high-backed Sheraton chair in the kitchen, or in her more modern lounge in the great entrance hall. He never grew tired of asking her questions about the various personages of Nevilton, their relation to Mr. Romer, and Mr. Romer’s relation to them. He used to watch her sometimes, as in drowsy sensual enjoyment she would bask in the hot sunshine on the terrace, or drift in her slow stealthy manner about the garden-paths, as if she were a great fascinating tame puma. He made endless sketches of her, in his little note-books, some of them of the most fantastic, and even Rabelaisean character. He had certainly never anticipated just this, when he accepted the shrewd financier’s invitation to his Elizabethan home. And if Susan Romer delighted him, Gladys Romer absolutely bewitched him. He treated her as if she were no grown-up young lady, but a romping and quite unscrupulous child; and the wily Gladys, quickly perceiving how greatly he was pleased by any naive display of youthful malice, or greed, or sensuality, or vanity, took good care to put no rein upon herself in the expression of her primitive emotions.

It was with Lacrima that Ralph Dangelis found himself on ground that was less secure, but in the genial aplomb of his all-embracing good-fellowships, it was only by degrees that he became conscious even of this. He found the place not only extraordinarily harmonious to his general temper, but extremely inspiring to his imaginative work. It only needed the securing of a few mechanical contrivances, a studio, for instance, with a north-light, to have made his sojourn at Nevilton one of the most prolific summers, in regard to his art, that he had experienced since his student days in Rome. He began vaguely to wish in the depths of his mind that it were possible for these good Romers to bestow upon him in perpetuity some pleasant airy chamber in their great house, so that he might not have to lose, for many summers to come, these agreeable and scandalous gossippings with the mother and these still more agreeable flirtations with the delicious daughter. This bold and fantastic idea was less a fabric of airy speculation than might have been supposed; for if the American was enchanted with his entertainers, his entertainers, at any rate the mother and the daughter, were extremely well pleased with him. The free sweep of his capacious sympathy, the absence in him of any punctilious gentility, the large and benignant atmosphere he diffused round him, and the mixture of cynical realism with considerate chivalry, were things so different from anything they had been accustomed to, that they both of them would willingly have offered him a suite of apartments in the house, if he could have accepted such an offer.

Dangelis was particularly lucky in arriving at Nevilton at this especial moment. An abnormally retarded spring had led to the most delicious overlapping in the varied flora of the place. Though June had begun, there were still many flowers lingering in the shadier spots of the woods and ditches, which properly belonged not only to May, but to very early May. Certain, even, of April’s progeny had not completely faded from the late-flowering lanes.

The artist found himself surrounded by a riotous revel of leafy exuberance. The year’s “primal burst” had occurred, not in reluctant spasmodic fits and starts, as is usual in our intermittent fine weather, but in a grand universal outpouring of the earth’s sap. His imagination answered spontaneously to this appeal, and his note-books were speedily filled with hurried passionate sketches, made at all hours of the long bright days, and full of suggestive charm. One particularly lovely afternoon the American found himself wandering slowly up the hill from the little Nevilton station, after a brief excursion to Yeoborough in search of pigments and canvas. He was hoping to take advantage of this auspicious stirring of his imaginative senses, by entering upon some more important and more continuous work. The Nevilton ladies had assured him that it would be quite impossible to find in the little town the kind of materials he needed; and he was returning in high spirits to assure them that he had completely falsified their prediction. He suspected Gladys of having invented this difficulty with a view to confining his labours to such easily shared sketching-trips as she might accompany him upon, but though the fascination of the romping and toying girl still retained, and had even increased, its power over him; he was, in this case, impelled and driven by a force stronger and more dominant than any sensual attraction. He was in a better mood for painting than he had ever been in his life, and nothing could interfere with his resolution to exploit this mood to its utmost limit. With the most precious of his newly purchased materials under his arm and the more bulky ones promised him that same evening, Dangelis, as he drifted slowly up the sunny road chatting amicably with such rural marketers as overtook him, felt in a peculiarly harmonious temper.

He had recently, in the western cities of the States, won a certain fiercely contested notoriety in the art of portrait-painting, an art which he had come more and more to practise according to the very latest of those daring modern theories, which are summed up sometimes under the not very illuminative title of Post-impressionism, and he had, during the last few days, indulged in a natural and irresistible wish to associate this new departure with his personal experiences at Nevilton.

Gossiping nonchalantly with the village-wives, as he ascended the dusty road, by the vicarage wall, his thoughts ran swiftly over the motley-coloured map of his past life, and the deviating track across the world which he had been led to follow. He congratulated himself in his heart, as he indulged in easy persiflage with his fellow-wayfarers, upon his consistent freedom from everything that might choke or restrain the freedom of his will.

How fortunate, how incredibly fortunate, that he should, in weather like this, and in so abounding a mood of creative energy, be completely his own master, except for the need of propitiating two naive and amusing women! He entertained himself by the thought of how little they really knew him,—these friendly Romers—how little they sounded his real purposes, his essential feelings! To them no doubt, he was no more than he was to these excellent villagers,—a tall, fair, slouching, bony figure, with a face,—if they went as far as his face,—massively heavy and irregular, with dreamy humorous eyes and a mouth addicted to nervous twitching.

A clump of dandelions, obtruding their golden indifference to human drama, into the dust of the road at his feet, mixed oddly, at that moment, in these obscure workings of his brain, with a sort of savage caress of self-complacent congratulation which he suddenly bestowed on his interior self; as, beneath his pleasant chatter with his rural companions, he thought how imperturbable, how ferocious, his secret egoism was, and how well he concealed it under his indolent good-nature! He had passed now the entrance to the vicarage garden, and in the adjoining field he observed with a curious thrill of psychic sympathy the tenacious grip with which a viciously-knotted ash-tree held to the earth with its sturdy roots. Out-walked at last by all the other returned travellers, Dangelis glanced without pausing down the long Italianated avenue, at the end of which shone red, in the afternoon sun, the mullioned windows of the great house. He preferred to prolong his stroll, by taking the circuitous way, round by the village. He knew the expression of that famous west front too well now, to linger in admiration over its picturesque repose in the afternoon sunshine. As a matter of fact a slight chill of curious antipathy crossed his consciousness as he quickened his steps.

Happily situated though he was, in his pleasant lodging beneath that capacious roof, the famous edifice itself had not altogether won his affection. The thing suggested to his wayward and prairie-nurtured soul, a stately product rather of convention than of life. He felt oddly conscious of it as something symbolic of what would be always intrinsically opposed to him, of what would willingly, if it were able, suppress him and render him helpless.

Dangelis belonged to quite a different type of trans-Atlantic visitor, from the kind that hover with exuberant delight over everything that is “old” or “English” or “European.” He was essentially rather an artist than an antiquary, rather an energetic workman than an epicurean sentimentalist. Once out of sight of the Elizabethan pile, the curious chill passed from his mind, and as he approached the first cottages of the village he looked round for more reassuring tokens. Such tokens were not lacking. They crowded in upon him, indeed, from every side. Stopping for a moment, ere the houses actually blocked his view, and leaning over a gate which faced westward, Dangelis looked out across the great Somersetshire plain, to which Leo’s Hill and Nevilton Mount serve the office of watchful sentinels. Tall, closely-clipped elm-trees, bordering every field, gave the country on this side of the horizon, a queer artificial look, as if it had been one huge landscape-garden, arranged according to the arbitrary pleasure of some fantastic artist, whose perversion it was to reduce every natural extravagance to the meticulous rhythm of his own formal taste.

This impression, the impression of something willed and intentional in the very formation of Nature, gave our eccentric onlooker a caressing and delicate pleasure, a sense as of a thing peculiarly harmonious to his own spirit. The formality of Nevilton House depressed and chilled him, but the formality of age-trimmed trees and hedges liberated his imagination, as some perverse work of a Picasso or a Matisse might have done. He wondered vaguely to himself what was the precise cause of the psychic antipathy which rendered him so cold to the grandeur of Elizabethan architecture, while the other features of his present dwelling remained so attractive, and he came to the temporary solution, as he took his arms from the top of the gate, that it was because that particular kind of magnificence expressed the pride of a class, rather than of an individual, whereas he himself was all for individual self-assertion in everything—in everything! The problem was still teasing him, when, a few minutes later, he passed the graceful tower of St. Catharine’s church.

This strangely organic, this curiously anonymous Gothic art—was not this also, the suppression of the individual, in the presence of something larger and deeper, of something that demanded the sacrifice of mere transient personality, as the very condition of its appearance? At all events it was less humiliating, less of an insult, to the claims of the individual will, when the thing was done in the interest of religion, than when it was done in the interests of a class. The impersonality of the former, resembled the impersonality of rocks and flowers; that of the latter, the impersonality of fashions in dress.

“But away with them both!” muttered Dangelis to himself, as he strode viciously down the central street of Nevilton. The American was in very truth, and he felt he was, for all his artistic receptivity, an alien and a foreigner in the midst of these time-worn traditions. In spite of their beauty he knew himself profoundly opposed to them. They excited fibres of opposition and rebellion in him, that went down to the very depths of his nature. If, allowing full scope to our speculative fancy—and who knows upon what occult truths these wandering thoughts sometimes stumble?—we image the opposing “streams of tendency,” in Nevilton village, as focussed and summed up, in the form of the Gothic church, guarded by the consecrated Mount, and the form of the Elizabethan house, owned by the owner of Leo’s Hill, it is clear that this wanderer, from the shores of the Great Lakes, was equally antagonistic to both of them. He brought into the place a certain large and elemental indifference. To the child of the winds and storms of the Great Lakes, as, so one might think, to the high fixed stars themselves, this local strife of opposed mythologies must needs appear a matter of but trifling importance.

The American was not permitted, on this occasion, to pursue his meditations uninterrupted to the end of his walk. Half-way down the south drive he was overtaken by Gladys, returning from the village post-office. “Hullo! How have you got on?” she cried. “I suppose you’ll believe me another time? You know now, I expect, how impossible the Yeoborough shops are!”

“On the contrary,” said the artist smiling, “I have found them extremely good. Perhaps I am less exacting,” he added, “than some artists.”

“I am exacting in everything,” said Gladys, “especially in people. That is why I get on so well with you. You are a new experience to me.”

Dangelis made no reply to this and they paced in silence under the tall exotic cedars until they reached the house.

“There’s mother!” cried the girl, pushing open the door that led into the kitchen premises, and pulling the American unceremoniously in after her. They found Mrs. Romer before a large oak table, set in the mullioned window of the housekeeper’s little room. She was arranging flowers for the evening’s dinner-table. The plump lady welcomed Dangelis effusively and made him sit down upon a Queen Anne settle of polished mahogany which stood in the corner of the fire-place. Gladys remained standing, a tall softly-moulded figure, appealingly girlish in her light muslin frock. She swayed slightly, backwards and forwards, pouting capriciously at her mother’s naive discourse, and loosening her belt with both her hands.

“Why should you ever go back to America?” Mrs. Romer was saying. “Don’t go, dear Mr. Dangelis. Stay with us here till the end of the summer. The Red room in the south passage was getting quite damp before you came. Please, don’t go! Gladys and I are getting so fond of you, so used to your ways and all that. Aren’t we Gladys? Why should you go? There are plenty of lovely bits of scenery about here. And you can have a studio built! Yes! Why not? Couldn’t he, Gladys? The lumber-room in the south passage—opposite where Lily sleeps—would make a splendid place for painting in hot weather. I suppose a north light, though, would be impossible. But some kind of glass arrangement might be made. I must talk to Mortimer about it. I suppose you rich Americans think nothing of calling in builders and putting up studios. I suppose you do it everywhere. America must be full of north light. But perhaps something of the kind could be done. I really don’t understand architecture, but Mortimer does. Mortimer understands everything. I daresay it wouldn’t be very expensive. It would only mean buying the glass.”

The admirable woman, whose large fair face and double chin had grown quite creased and shiny with excitement, turned at last to her daughter who had been coquettishly and dreamily staring at the smiling artist.

“Why don’t you say something, Gladys? You don’t want Mr. Dangelis to go, any more than I do, do you?”

The girl moved to the table and picking up a large peony stuck it wantonly and capriciously into her dress. “I have my confirmation lesson tonight,” she said. “I must be at Mr. Clavering’s by six. What’s the time now?” She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. “Why, it’s nearly half-past four! I wonder where Lacrima is. Never mind! We must have tea without her. I’m sure Mr. Dangelis is dying for tea. Let’s have it out on the terrace.”

“At six?” repeated Mrs. Romer. “I thought the class was always at seven. It was given out to be seven. I heard the notice on Sunday.”

Gladys looked smilingly at the American as she answered her mother. “Don’t be silly, dear. You know Mr. Clavering takes me separately from the others. The others are all village people.”

Mrs. Romer rose from her seat with something between a sigh and a chuckle. “I hadn’t the least idea,” she said, “that he took you separately. You’ve been going to these classes for three weeks and you’ve never mentioned such a thing until this moment. Well—never mind! I expect Mr. Dangelis will not object to strolling down the drive with you. You’d better both get ready for tea now. I’ll go and tell somebody we want it.”

She had no sooner departed than Gladys began flicking the American, in playful childish sport, with a spray of early roses. He entered willingly into the game, and a pleasant tussle ensued between them as he sought to snatch the flowers out of her hands. She resisted but he pushed her backwards, and held her imprisoned against the edge of the table, teasing her as if she were a romping child of twelve.

“So you are going to these classes alone, are you?” he said. “I see that your English clergymen are allowed extraordinary privileges. I expect you cause him a good deal of agitation, poor dear man, if you flirt with him as shamelessly as you do with me. Well, go ahead! I’m not responsible for you. In fact I’m all for spurring you on. It’ll amuse me to see what happens. But no doubt all sorts of things have happened already! I suppose you’ve made Mr. Clavering desperately in love with you. I expect you persecute him unmercifully. I know you. I know your ways.” He playfully pinched her arm. “But go on. It’ll be an amusement to me to watch the result of all this. I like being a sort of sympathetic onlooker, in these things. I like the idea of hiding behind the scenes, and watching the tricks of a naughty little flirt like you, set upon troubling the mind of a poor harmless minister.”

The reply made by the daughter of the House to this challenge was a simple but effective one. Like a mischievous infant caught in some unpardonable act, she flagrantly and shamelessly put out her tongue at him. Long afterwards, with curious feelings, Dangelis recalled this gesture. He associated it to the end of his life with the indefinable smell of cut flowers, with their stalks in water, and the pungency of peony-petals.

Tea, when it reached our friends upon the stately east terrace, proved a gay and festive meal. The absence of the reserved and nervous Italian, and also of the master of Nevilton, rendered all three persons more completely and freely at their ease, than they had ever been since the American’s first appearance. The grass was being cut at that corner of the park, and the fresh delicious smell, full of the very sap of the earth, poured in upon them across the sunny flower beds. The chattering of young starlings, the cawing of young rooks, blended pleasantly with the swish of the scythes and the laughter of the hay-makers; and from the distant village floated softly to their ears all those vague and characteristic sounds which accompany the close of a hot day, and the release from labour of men and beasts. As they devoured their bread and butter with that naive greediness which is part of the natural atmosphere of this privileged hour in an English home, the three friends indicated by their playful temper and gay discourse that they each had secret reasons for self-congratulation.

Dangelis felt an exquisite sense of new possibilities in his art, drawn from the seduction of these surroundings and the frank animalism of his cheerful companions. He sat between them, watching their looks and ways, very much as Rubens or Franz Hals might have watched the rounded bosoms and spacious gestures of two admirable burgess-women in some country house of Holland.

Mrs. Romer, below her garrulous chatter, nourished fantastic and rose-colored dreams, in which inestimable piles of dollars, and limitless rows of golden haired grand-children, played the predominant part. Gladys, flushed and excited, gave herself up to the imagined exercise of every sort of wanton and wilful power, with the desire for which the flowing sap of the year’s exuberance filled her responsive veins.

Tea over, Dangelis suggested that he should accompany the girl to Mr. Clavering’s door.

“You needn’t be there for three quarters of an hour,” he said, “let’s go across to the mill copse first, and see if there are any blue-bells left.”

Gladys willingly consented, and Susan Romer, remaining pensive in her low cane chair, watched their youthful figures retreating across the sunlit park with a sigh of profound thankfulness addressed vaguely and obscurely to Omnipotence. This was indeed the sort of son-in-law she craved. How much more desirable than that reserved and haughty young Ilminster! Gladys would be, three times over, a fool if she let him escape.

A few minutes later the artist and his girl-friend reached the mill spinney. He helped her over the stream and the black thorn hedge without too much damage to her frock and he was rewarded for his efforts by the thrill of vibrating pleasure with which she plunged her hands among the oozy stalks of those ineffable blue flowers.

“No wonder young Hyacinth was too beautiful to live,” he remarked.

“Shut up,” was the young woman’s reply, as she breathlessly stretched herself along the length of a fallen branch, and endeavoured to reach the damp moist stalks and cool leaves with her forehead and lips.

“How silly it is, having one’s hair done up,” she cried presently, raising herself on her hands from her prone position, and kicking the branch viciously with her foot.

“You’d have liked me with my hair down, Mr. Dangelis,” she continued. “Lying like this,” and she once more embraced the fallen bough, “it would have got mixed up with all those blue-bells and then you would have had something to paint!”

“Bad girl!” cried the artist playfully, switching her lightly with a willow wand from which he had been stripping the bark. “I would have made you do your hair up, tight round your head, years and years ago.”

He offered her his hand and lifted her up. Once in possession of those ardent youthful fingers, he seemed to consider himself justified in retaining them and, as the girl made no sign of dissent, they advanced hand in hand through the thick undergrowth.

The place was indeed a little epitome of the season’s prolific growth. Above and about them, elder-bushes and hazels met in entangled profusion; while at their feet the marshy soil was covered with a mass of moss and cool-rooted leafy plants. Golden-green burdocks grew there, and dark dog-mercury; while mixed with aromatic water-mint and ground ivy, crowds of sturdy red campions lifted up their rose-coloured heads. The undergrowth was so thick, and the roots of the willows and alders so betraying, that over and over again he had to make a path for her, and hold back with his hand some threatening withy-switch or prickly thorn branch, that appeared likely to invade her face or body.

The indescribable charm of the hour, as the broken sunlight, almost horizontal now, threw red patches, like the blood of wounded satyrs, upon tree-trunks and mossy stumps, and made the little marsh-pools gleam as if filled with fairy wine, found its completest expression in the long-drawn flute-music, at the same time frivolously gay and exquisitely sad, of the blackbird’s song. An angry cuckoo, crying its familiar cry as it flew, flapped away from some hidden perch, just above their heads.

Not many more blackbird’s notes and not many more cuckoo’s cries would that diminutive jungle hear, before the great midsummer silence descended upon it, to be broken only by the less magical sounds of the later season. Nothing but the auspicious accident of the extreme lateness of the spring had given to the visitor from Ohio these revelations of enchantment. It was one of those unequalled moments when the earth seems to breathe out from its most secret heart perfumes and scents that seem to belong to a more felicitous planet than our planet, murmurs and voices adapted to more responsive ears than our ears.

It was doubtless, so Dangelis thought, on such an evening as this, that the first notion of the presence in such places of beings of a finer and yet a grosser texture than man’s, first entered the imagination of humanity. In such a spot were the earth-gods born.

Many feathered things, besides blackbirds and cuckoos abounded in the mill spinney.

They had scarcely reached the opposite end of the little wood, when with a sudden cry of excitement and a quick sinking on her knees, the girl turned to him with a young thrush in her hand. It was big enough to be capable of flying and, as she held it in her soft white fingers, it struggled desperately and uttered little cries. She held it tightly in one hand, and with the other caressed its ruffled feathers, looking sideways at her companion, as she did so, with dreamy, half-shut, voluptuous eyes.

“Little darling,” she whispered. And then, with a breathless gasp in her voice,—“Kiss its head, Mr. Dangelis. It can’t get away.” He stooped over her as she held the bird up to him, and if in obeying her he brushed with his lips fingers as well as feathers, the accident was not one he could bring himself to regret.

“It can’t get away,” she repeated, in a low soft murmur.

The bird did, however, get away, a moment afterwards, and went fluttering off through the brushwood, with that delicious, awkward violence, which young thrushes share with so many other youthful things.

In the deep ditch which they now had to cross, the artist caught sight of a solitary half-faded primrose, the very last, perhaps, of its delicate tribe. He showed it to Gladys, gently smoothing away, as he did so, the heavy leaves which seemed to be overshadowing its last days of life.

The girl pushed him aside impetuously, and plucking the faded flower deliberately thrust it into her mouth.

“I love eating them,” she cried, “I used to do it when I was ever so little and I do it still when I am alone. You’ve no idea how nice they taste!”

At that moment they heard the sound of the church clock striking six.

“Quick!” cried Gladys. “Mr. Clavering will be waiting. He’ll be cross if I’m too dreadfully late.”

They emerged from the wood and followed the grass-grown lane, round by the small mill-pond. Crossing the park once more, they entered the village by the Yeoborough road.

“What a girl!” said Dangelis to himself, in a voice of unmitigated admiration, as he held open for her, at last, the little gate of the old vicarage garden, and waved his good-bye.

“What a girl! Heaven help that unfortunate Mr. Clavering! If he’s as susceptible as most of these young Englishmen, she’ll make havoc of his poor heart. Will he read the ‘Imitation’ with her, I wonder?”

He strolled slowly back, the way they had come, the personality of the insidious Gladys pressing less and less heavily upon him as his thought reverted to his painting. He resolved that he would throw all these recent impressions together in some large and sumptuous picture, that should give to these modern human figures something of the ample suggestion and noble aplomb, the secret of which seemed to have been lost to the world with the old Flemish and Venetian masters.

What in his soul he vaguely imaged as his task, was an attempt to eliminate all mystic and symbolic attitudes from his works, and to catch, in their place, if the inspiration came to him, something of the lavish prodigality, superbly material, and yet possessed of ineffable vistas, of the large careless evocations of nature herself.

His imaginative purpose, as it defined itself more and more clearly in his mind, during his solitary return through the evening light, seemed to imply an attempted reproduction of those aspects of the human drama, in such a place as this, which carried upon their surface the air of things that could not happen otherwise, and which, in their large inevitableness, over-brimmed and over-flowed all traditional distinctions. He would have liked to have given, in this way, to the figures of Gladys and her mother, something of the superb non-moral “insouciance,” springing, like the movements of animals and the fragrance of plants, out of the bosom of an earth innocent of both introspection and renunciation, which one observes in the forms of Attic sculpture, or in the creations of Venetian colourists. Below the high ornamental wall of Nevilton garden he paused a moment before entering the little postern-gate, to admire the indescribable greenness and luxuriousness of the heavy grass devoted in this place, not to hay-makers but to cattle. There was a sort of poetry, he humorously told himself, even about the great black heaps of cow-dung which alternated here with the golden clumps of drowsy buttercups. They also,—why not?—might be brought into the kind of picture he visioned, just as Veronese brought his mongrels and curs to the very feet of the Saviour!

Dangelis lifted his eyes, to where, through a gap in the leafy uplands, the more distant hills were visible. He could make out clearly, in the rich purple light, the long curving lines of the Corton downs, as they melted, little by little, in a floating lake of aerial blue-grey vapour, the exhalation of the great valley’s day-long breathing.

He could even mark, at the end of the Corton range—and the sight of it gave him a thrilling sense of the invincible continuity of life in these regions—the famous tree-crested circle of Cadbury Camp, the authentic site of the Arthurian Camelot.

What a lodging this Nevilton was, to pass one’s days in, to work in, and to love and dream! What enchantments were all around him! What memories! What dumb voices!