It was quiet in the garden; he liked the security of gardens, he liked the gentleness of these little grey West-country manor-houses such as the Manor House of King’s Avon; they shut out the wild; they ignored the great pale Downs, and the rovings of such dark people as Gipsy Lovel. And he began to talk, murmuring much of what he had obscurely felt, “A pastoral country,” he said, “fair and straightforward, a stranger might think; and yet we who live in it know better, we know its dim hauntings, we know how present are the dead, we know the little countless tragedies,--the rabbit squealing beneath the stoat, the blackbird pecked by the sparrowhawk. We know the perpetual enmity that goes on under the apparent harmony.” And,--what possessed him?--he spoke also of Lovel. “That dark, supple fellow,--he knows as much as anybody of the secrets of the woods; he’s got a quick eye and a sure hand, and a glance like the glance of an animal ready to spring away; it’s a wild blood they have in them, the gipsies, whether they live in a house or move their hearth about with them,--a strong stain of blood, that never gets washed out. Look at that fellow, now,--he never takes a regular job,--he strays from farmer to farmer, when he isn’t sneaking on his own concerns. And it’s all the gipsy blood in him, Miss Clare,--untamed he lives, and untamed he’ll die. But he understands the country, I dare wager, as well as any hare or kestrel that hides or flies, taking its chance of life and death.” It struck him as absurd that in this hour when all his faculty was bent upon so different a matter, he should be discoursing idly of the country and the vagrant fellow he was accustomed to sight sometimes upon a distant skyline; but he knew that some connection existed in his mind, and traced it down to his constant uneasiness about Clare. It was all very well for him to speak airily, confident now in the security of the Manor House garden,--outside the garden lay the Downs,--and where had Clare been? where did Clare spend all her days? Demure she paced beside him, and the black cedar spread its flat branches above the lawn, and within the lighted windows Mr. Warrener poked among the shards on his desk; secure! secure! but danger lay behind the pretence, danger in confederacy with Clare. Demure she paced beside him in the summer night, drawing her lace scarf close about her shoulders, so that one pale gleaming hand lay against her breast, holding the lace, but she was silent, shut away with her uncommunicated thoughts. He trusted himself abruptly to the direct question. “Clare, what is the matter?” She was too big, too simple, to defend herself with the ready-to-hand artifice of denial or evasion.