own concerns to pay her more than the tribute of a passing distaste. Clare had been to his house, his room had contained Clare, her voice had vibrated through the air he breathed, her hand had rested on his door handle, her foot had trodden his stair. She might come again--but such was his fantasy that he all but dreaded lest the return of her presence should disturb the perfection of his memory. He was almost content, for the moment, that he might remain at Starvecrow, doing her service. A garden, she had said; and he toiled at the obstinate soil till his hands lost their refinement and hardened in the palms, and he smiled to see his broken nails. Mrs. Quince observed him sarcastically from the windows of the house, hands on hips. He had thrown aside his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeves. “But he’ll need to do away with those silk shirts if he’s to go in for pick and mattock,” she grumbled, between tenderness and scorn. Calladine was indeed an incongruous figure, spare and delicate of build, with his greying hair that gave him a slightly eighteenth century appearance, and his long back bent over the stones and flints of that untilled hillside. He thought, sometimes ruefully, when he stood up to stretch his back and to survey the little progress he had made, that Clare had set him a harder task than she knew. He began to invest it with characteristically romantic properties. It was like scaling the Hill of Glass, or separating the wheat from the millet, or travelling to the ends of the earth to bring back a jet bottled from the Singing Fountain. If he could transform this strong wilderness to a blowing curtseying garden, might he, having accomplished his task, present himself to claim his prize? And what would she say, she the distant, she the all-unconscious, when she came to inspect the results of his labours? Would she praise? would she deride? he swung his pick again with an unconvinced jeer at himself for the fabric of symbolism he was creating. “The new mistress’ll have nothing to say to my old-fashioned ways,” Mrs. Quince observed to Martha, suggesting that it was she herself whom she thus slightly derided. Martha, simple soul, was taken in. “Likely enough, Mrs. Quince, she has a rare eye to the ordering of a house.” Mrs. Quince smiled on one side of her face. “She took over from me when she was fifteen,” continued Martha in perfect good faith, “and I wasn’t able to call my dusters my own. Look what she has made Mr. Calladine do already; the house isn’t the gloomy place it was.” “What he has done was Mr. Calladine’s own choice,” said Mrs. Quince tartly. “But you may be sure she put him up to it,” Martha replied.