But Martha thought silence must mean dulness. ‘We are dreadfully quiet to-day,’ she said. ‘We must do something to get the steam up. Shall we have some riddles? I know lots of good ones that I didn’t ask you yesterday.’ ‘Please don’t,’ cried Nero; ‘I am not equal to it. I think a single conundrum would crush me. Let us sit and dream. “How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream! To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height.”’ Martha looked round inquiringly. She did not see either myrrh-bush or height in the landscape. They were in a level bit of the park, shut in by trees. ‘Is that poetry?’ she asked. ‘Well, it’s the nearest approach to it that the last half-century has produced,’ replied the unknown, and then he went on quoting: ‘“But propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us blowing lowly), With half-dropt eyelids still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill.” Poppæa, I wish you and I were queen and king of a Lotos Island, and could idle away our lives in perpetual summer.’ ‘We should soon grow tired of it,’ answered Daphne. ‘I am like the little boy in the French story-book. I delight in all the seasons. And I daresay you skate, hunt, and do all manner of things that couldn’t be done in summer.’ ‘True, my astute empress. But when one is setting under lime-boughs on such a day as this, eternal summer seems your only idea of happiness.’ He gave himself up to idle musing. Yes; he was surprised, disappointed even, at the notion of this bright-haired nymph’s parentage. There was no discredit in being a tradesman’s daughter. He was very far from feeling a contempt for commerce. There were reasons in his own history why he should have considerable respect for successful trade. But for this girl he had imagined a different pedigree. She had a high-bred air—even in her reckless unconventionally—which accorded ill with his idea of a prosperous tradesman’s daughter. There was a poetry in her every look and movement, a wild untutored grace, which was the strangest of all flowers to have blossomed in a parlour behind a London shop. Reared in the smoke and grime of Oxford Street! Brought up amidst ever present considerations of pounds, shillings, and pence! The girl and her surroundings were so incongruous that the mere idea of them worried him. ‘And by-and-by she will marry some bloated butcher or pompous coach-builder, and spend all her days among the newly rich,’ he thought. ‘She will grow into the fat wife of a fat alderman, and overdress and overeat herself, and live a life of prosperous vulgarity.’