She sat down in his worn old leather chair, took off her hat, and hung it on the chair-knob. She seemed to him to light the room by her presence, the room which was dingy if not actually poor, and which had never before had in it anything so delicate and fresh as Clare with her muslins and her small yellow head leaning against the chair-back. But he was afraid almost of speaking to her, lest he should scare her away, so like was she to some small shy animal which by wary gentleness he should have enticed into his home. “You are wearing all the colours of the dawn,” he said, “lavender and primrose,” and ceased because he dared not go on to the blue of her eyes, that he thought like the blue of the early sky. She smiled at him. “You have made no garden here, in all your twenty years,” she said. “You should build a wall round a square enclosure, and fill the beds between your paths. The wall would protect you against the wind and you should grow lupin and iris and tulips, honesty, sweet sultan, and snapdragons, and a path down the centre between cottage lilies and China roses.” She was speaking against her own convictions; she infinitely preferred her Downs uncultivated; but her instinct, strangely indulgent towards Calladine, told her what would most comfort him. “I have no heart to do such things,” he replied, “but since you order it I will set about it immediately.” “Mr. Calladine,” she said, leaning forward, “when you answer me so gravely, are you indeed serious, or are you laughing at me in your sleeve?” “Serious! you can have no idea how serious,” he exclaimed, tempted to speak out his whole heart, as he had never before been tempted, by the sight of her earnest eyes; and he got up, and walked about the room. “Don’t you know, that your caprice would be my only interest? my only law? You are the only person,” he said, recollecting himself, “that has taken an interest in my poor concerns,--cared whether I steeped myself in sorrow or dragged myself out into the wholesomeness of a new life.” (“Ah,” cried Clare’s conscience within her, “how little I have cared!”) “But for you,” he went on, “I should have continued in my dejection; only your encouragement, lately, has revived me, and I have realised that I was not the old and finished man I had resigned myself to be. If you order me a garden, I will turn gardener at fifty,--if you, that is, will be my critic and my adviser, if you will command me to do this and do that.” She saw, then, how easily swayed he was, and how an idea could take possession of his mind, for beyond an occasional kindness she could not be said to have interested herself at all in his concerns or to have encouraged him to forsake the gloomy ways of retrospect or his solitary habits of life. Still she was very glad that his imagination should be able to thrive on such meagre nourishment; it did her no harm, and she was glad if it might do him good.