‘It is an idle dreamy life,’ he wrote. ‘When I am not shooting land-fowl on the hills, or water-fowl from my dingey, I sit on the deck and sketch, till I grow almost into a seavegetable—a zoophyte which contracts and expands with a faintly pleasurable sensation—and calls that life. I read no end of poetry—Byron, Shelley, Keats—and that book whose wisdom and whose beauty no amount of reading can ever dry up—Goethe’s “Faust.” I want no new books—the old ones are inexhaustible. Curiosity may tempt me to look at a new writer; but in an age of literary mediocrity I go back for choice to the Titans of the past. Do you think I am scornful of your favourites, Tennyson and Browning? No, love. They, too, are Titans; but we shall value them more when they have received the divine honours that can only come after death. ‘I am longing to be with you, and yet I feel that I am doing myself a world of good in this rough open-air life. I was getting a little moped at the Abbey. The place is so big, and so dreary, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty—waiting to wake into life and brightness at the coming of love and you. The lonely rooms are haunted by my dear mother’s image, and by the sense of my loss. When you come I shall be so happy in the present that the pain of past sorrow will be softened. ‘I sit sketching these romantic caves—where we earn our dinner by shooting the innocent rock-pigeons—and thinking of you, and of my delight in showing you this coast next autumn. ‘Yes, love, we will have a yacht. I know you are fond of the sea. Your sister is a fanatic in her love of the water. How she will delight in these islands!’ He thought of Daphne sometimes, as he sat in the bow of the boat, lulled almost to slumber by the rise and fall of the waves gently lapping the hull. His brush fell idle across the little tin colour-box, and he gave himself up to listless reverie. How Daphne would love this free unfettered life: a life in which there were no formalities; no sitting prim and straight at an orderly dinner-table; no conventional sequence of everyday ceremonies in a hideous monotony. It was a roving gipsy life which must needs please that erratic soul. ‘Poor little Daphne! It is strange that she and I don’t get on better,’ he said to himself. ‘We were such capital friends at Fontainebleau. Perhaps the recollection of that day is in some way disagreeable to her. She has been very stand-offish to me ever since—except by fits and starts. There are times when she forgets to be formal; and then she is charming.’ Yes; there had been times—times when all that was picturesque and poetical in her nature asserted itself, and when her future brother-in-law succumbed to the spell, and admired her just a little more warmly than he felt to be altogether well for his peace, or perchance for hers.