At the upper end of the lane she saw a little house answering to the description, whose front garden, window-sills, palings, and doorstep were literally ablaze with nasturtiums in bloom. She entered this inhabited nosegay, quietly asked for the invalid, and if he were well enough to see Miss Power. The woman of the house soon returned, and she was conducted up a crooked staircase to Somerset’s modest apartments. It appeared that some rooms in this dwelling had been furnished by the landlady of the inn, who hired them of the tenant during the summer season to use as an annexe to the hotel. Admitted to the outer room she beheld her architect looking as unarchitectural as possible; lying on a small couch which was drawn up to the open casement, whence he had a back view of the window flowers, and enjoyed a green transparency through the undersides of the same nasturtium leaves that presented their faces to the passers without. When the latch had again clicked into the catch of the closed door Paula went up to the invalid, upon whose pale and interesting face a flush had arisen simultaneously with the announcement of her name. He would have sprung up to receive her, but she pressed him down, and throwing all reserve on one side for the first time in their intercourse, she crouched beside the sofa, whispering with roguish solicitude, her face not too far from his own: ‘How foolish you are, George, to get ill just now when I have been wanting so much to see you again!--I am so sorry to see you like this--what I said to you when we met on the shore was not what I had come to say!’ Somerset took her by the hand. ‘Then what did you come to say, Paula?’ he asked. ‘I wanted to tell you that the mere wanton wandering of a capricious mind was not the cause of my estrangement from you. There has been a great deception practised--the exact nature of it I cannot tell you plainly just at present; it is too painful--but it is all over, and I can assure you of my sorrow at having behaved as I did, and of my sincere friendship now as ever.’ ‘There is nothing I shall value so much as that. It will make my work at the castle very pleasant to feel that I can consult you about it without fear of intruding on you against your wishes.’ ‘Yes, perhaps it will. But--you do not comprehend me.’ ‘You have been an enigma always.’ ‘And you have been provoking; but never so provoking as now. I wouldn’t for the world tell you the whole of my fancies as I came hither this evening: but I should think your natural intuition would suggest what they were.’ ‘It does, Paula. But there are motives of delicacy which prevent my acting on what is suggested to me.’ ‘Delicacy is a gift, and you should thank God for it; but in some cases it is not so precious as we would persuade ourselves.’ ‘Not when the woman is rich, and the man is poor?’