She was on her knees beside a tuft of red bronze Tyrolean saxifrage, out of whose close carpet of velvet the tiny silver-green scimitars of the _iris alata_ curved round guarding its broad, purple-blue blossoms. For they were in the winter-garden now. Not one of those crystal palaces of palms and hot-water pipes which answer to that name in the minds of so many. No! This was a real garden, in full air, but tucked away from every breeze that blows in a cove giving on the sea. Among the rocks above the small cleft of sandy beach on which the tide lapped lazily, grew all the kindly green things innumerable which have learnt to do without the rest of winter sleep. The winding walks edged their narrow way through great tinted carpets of saxifrage and sedums, and many another sturdy-leaved coverer of bare earth. Bronze and sage and golden, brown and purple and grey, with a few blue blossoms on a creeping veronica, a few late primroses, a few early winter aconites. And through it, over all, was the fine scent of the winter heliotrope that clung to the crannies of the rocks or grew lush by the little stream, which, falling in tinkling cascades, slid along the sand into the sea. It was such a garden as every one with patience and care might have; which none but the very few take the trouble to plant. There was nothing in it to tell of wealth save an old stone sphinx jutting out by the steps which led to the tiny wedge of beach, its plinth forming a sort of jetty, beside which a boat lay moored. That had the measureless calm of Egypt in its eyes as it stood, backed by the changeful sky, the changeful sea. "I believe it sees me," added Aura, looking up from the broad open face of the flower, her own as open, as beautiful, "and it has never seen me before. That makes me feel less strange, here where everything is new--and strange. It seems to me I have seen more to-day than in all my life before. It is so curious----" "What? To see new things?" he answered, smiling down at her. "Isn't that the only thing worth having in life--to be able to think when you wake, 'To-day something may come to me which never came before'--to feel a sort of perpetual annunciation----" She stood up suddenly, measuring him with narrowed eyes. "I do not understand," she began. He shook his head. "Oh yes, you do. I'm sure of it. Sit down on the plinth there and I'll try and tell you what I mean." So with the sphinx above her she sat and listened. It was not much he had to say. Only the half-whimsical half-serious thoughts of a man, who, almost without knowing it, had the seeing eye for the invisible, the hearing ear for the inarticulate, who felt, vaguely, that the best part of life lay beyond the boundary set to conscious life by the majority of men. In formulated shape it was all new to her, but something in her, she knew not what, found it familiar, approved, and her face showed her approval, her interest.