‘Eh?’ she said, looking up in half-surprise, being much more interested in the sunflowers for their own sakes than in their future relation to the old Warwickshire Grange. ‘Oh yes, to be sure. I hope I shall finish the curtains; but it is a dreadful long way to look forward. There will be three hundred and fifty-five sunflowers. I have done one and a half. That leaves just three hundred and fifty-three and a half to do. I rather wish it were the other way.’ ‘Beginning to flag already?’ said Lina, who was sketching a little bit of the mountain landscape on the other side of the lake, a bold effect of sun and shadow. ‘Not the least in the world,’ cried Daphne; ‘only I do so long to see the effect of the curtains when they are finished. It will be stupendous. But do you know, Edgar, I am afraid your mother will detest them. One requires to be educated up to sunflowers; and Mrs. Turchill belongs to that degraded period of art in which people could see beauty in roses and lilies.’ ‘One can hardly look back upon those dark ages without a shudder,’ said Gerald Goring, stretched on a rustic bench close at hand, looking up at the blue sky, an image of purposeless idleness. ‘Thank Providence we have emerged from the age of curves into the age of angles—from the Hogarthian to the Burne-Jonesian ideal of beauty.’ ‘There was a period in my own life when I had not awakened to the loveliness of the sunflower,’ said Daphne gravely. ‘I know the first time I was introduced to one in crewel-work I thought it hideous; but since I have known Tadema’s pictures I am another creature. Yet I doubt if, even in my regenerate state, a garden all sunflowers would be quite satisfactory.’ ‘You would require the Roman atmosphere, classic busts and columns, Tyrian-dyed draperies, and everybody dressed in the straight-down Roman fashion,’ replied Gerald languidly. ‘No doubt Poppæa was fond of sunflowers; and I daresay they grew in that royal garden where Messalina held such high jinks that time her imperial husband came home unexpectedly and somewhat disturbed the harmony of the evening.’ It was altogether an idle kind of life which they were leading just now at Montreux. During the first week Edgar and Daphne had excursionised a little upon the nearest hillsides in the early morning before breakfast; but lovely as were the chestnut-woods and the limpid streamlets gushing out of their rocky beds and dripping into stone troughs fringed with delicate ferns, exquisite as was the morning air, and the fairy picture of the lake below them, developing some new charm with every hundred yards of the ascent, Daphne soon wearied of these morning rambles, and seemed glad to forego them. ‘The weather is getting horribly oppressive,’ she said, ‘or perhaps I am not quite so strong as I used to be. I would rather sit in the garden and amuse myself more lazily.’