He began to study her face with a view to painting it, and he was absorbed and fascinated by it. The lines of her cheek and of her neck made him itch to draw them. "Yes," he said, "I must paint you. I can do something good. I'm sure I can." "I wanted to ask if you would mind my painting you," she said. He was aghast at her impudence. She, a slip of a girl, a "top-knot," paint the great Kühler! She saw how horrified he was and added hastily:-- "Of course, I won't insist if you don't like sitting." She rose to go and he begged her to stay. "Don't go yet," he said with sudden emotion. "I don't want you to go. Somehow I feel as if you had been sitting there always and I don't want you to go. If you don't want to talk you needn't, but you must stay. I could see that my mother liked you at once, and she always knows good people. You made her happy about me. It was like sunshine to her when you came in, and I shall be wretched if you go, for I don't know what to think about you." "I know what I think about you." "What do you think?" "You have made me feel that London isn't just a place where the trains stop." And she began to tell him about her home and the river where she bathed with her brothers, the woods where in spring there were primroses and daffodils, and in summer bluebells. "Opposite the house," she said, "is a hill which is a common, all covered with gorse in the summer, and the hot, nutty smell of it comes up and seems to burn your face. There are snakes on the common--vipers and adders and grass-snakes. From the top you can see the downs, and beyond them, you know, is the sea. On moonlight nights it is glorious, and I nearly go mad sometimes with running in and out of the shadows. I believe I did go mad once, for I sat up on the top of the hill and sang and shouted and cried, all by myself, and I felt that my heart would break if I did not kiss something. The gorse was out, and I buried my face in the dewy yellow flowers. . . . I often think the woods are like churches on Easter Day. . . . And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am just a girl living in it, you know, it all seems wrong somehow." Mendel sat on the floor trying to puzzle out this mysterious rapture of hers. He had never heard of gorse or of downs, but he could recognize her emotion. He had had something like it the first time he saw a may-tree in blossom, and he had hardly been able to bear it. He had rather resented it, for it had interfered with his work for a day or two, and he could not help feeling that there was something indecent about an emotion with which he could do nothing. "Yes," he said heavily; "it must be very pretty."