He even gave a little sigh of relief as he turned away. Janet, not knowing whether she was more sorry or glad to be liberated, cast more than one furtive glance behind her at his departing figure. But it did not seem to have occurred to Paul to look after her. He walked on stately and straight, turning neither to one side nor the other, towards Spears’s shop. He had not meant to go, but neither had he intended any of the other things that had come to pass. Fate seemed to have got possession of him. He walked into the shop with the same straightforward steady tread, not as usual, that was impossible. Most likely there would have to be something said--but for that, too, he felt himself ready, if need were. Spears was no longer working at the simple work of his picture-frames. He had thrown them into a heap--all the little bits of carved work which he had been glueing and fitting into each other--and with a large sheet of paper on the table before him was drawing with much intentness and preoccupation. He had set the plume of the foxglove upright before him, and was bending his brows and contorting both limbs and features over his drawing as he had done over the lily he had designed for Alice. The handful of coloured gladiolus which had been lying on the table he had pushed impatiently aside, and they lay at his feet, here and there, scattered under the table and about the floor like things rejected, while he drew in the foxglove boldly with a blue pencil. All his soul seemed to be in his drawing. He scarcely took any notice of Paul--a half glance up, a hurried nod, and that was all. Presently, however, he took up one of the gladiolus stalks and laid it tentatively across the foxglove; then with a pshaw! of angry impatience tossed it away again. “That won’t do,” he said, half to himself, “none o’ that. Nature will not stand it. The free-growing, wild thing is grand, but that poor stiff, conventional rubbish, manufactured out of some gardener’s brains, out of his bad dreams, is good for nothing; and it’s everywhere the same, so far as I can see. Things must be wedded after their kind.” “Do you mean that for me, Spears?” “Do I mean that for you? Which are you? the grand tower of the foxglove that’s good for everything--strength and continuance and beauty--or that poor spiky trash? I don’t know. I mean nothing that I don’t understand.”