“How do you know?” she murmured. “Oh, I know,” he replied. His vision of the room, and of the three, was so sifted and precise. “Sometimes you sing?” he prompted her. “Mr. Calladine leans over the piano, when I sing,” she said, looking at him big-eyed. “That frightens you?” he said, more as a statement than as a question. “A little,” she said, telling him what she had thought she could never tell to a soul. “He seems so soft, and yet so hungry.” Her voice sank. Lovel understood; he nodded. “If he would sit away in the corner,” continued Clare, “I should not be afraid of him. It is his leaning over me like that. It makes me look at him all the while I sing. But he likes my singing; he asks me to do it, and he will not let me refuse.” “And sometimes you walk in the garden,” he said, still in the same voice, as though he were looking at a tiny picture seen down the end of a long vista; “does he frighten you then?” “Less out of doors; less when we are not shut in. I avoid the trees; being under them is more like having a ceiling over our heads. I keep to the lawn.--He is more in his place, within doors,” she said, making a discovery which answered many of her problems. “Lamplight suits him,” said Lovel, his perceptions very clear and malicious. She saw Calladine leaning over the piano; she saw his greying hair and his fine hands lying loosely clasped on the ebony lid. She heard the notes under her own fingers playing a slow gavotte; it was the music he liked. She felt her eyes coming round again and again in fascination drawn towards his face. A breeze fanned her cheek; and she saw herself standing with Lovel on the earthwork, the stars above their heads, and the red glow of the dying flames deepening the shadow of his brow. “We have always been in the open together,” she murmured involuntarily. “I have never seen you in a room,” Lovel corroborated. “The day that I found you on the Downs,” she said painfully, “the day when I last saw you,--you tried to hide from me among the beeches. Why was that? Did you hope that they would protect you? Did the sense of enclosure give you strength? Would the Downs have compelled you to be more honest? I believe it was that. One can lie better,--can’t one?--in a room; and as you had no room you took the shelter of the trees. You couldn’t tell me lies out on the Downs?” “Is that why Calladine prefers a room?” he enquired. “Mr. Calladine tells me no lies,” she said, with a small flicker of pride. “Oh, no,” said Lovel easily; “he only tells lies to himself. Through and through. Or are they lies? Romances, perhaps. Only romances. And you are part of them. But they couldn’t thrive in sunshine.”