For if he had helped to make Llanyglo, and knew its lighting and its watering, its building and its leases and its subsoil, Llanyglo had also helped to make him. The drub-drub on the Pier, the inanities of his friend Percy Briggs, evening parties that began at midnight and ended with the sun high in the sky, complaints from his sister that she saw him only in the short intervals between a coming home and a setting out again--this had been pretty much the reaction of Llanyglo on John Willie Garden. He was a very ordinary young man.--But here was a world peopled only by sheep, the myriad insects that hopped and wove and chirruped in the tall fern, the kites and curlews overhead, and the trout far below the surface of the lake. His lashes made rainbows before his half-closed eyes, and those eyes, opening again, could gaze at the tips of the sunny fern against the deeps of the sky until the difference between them became almost as intensified as the difference between dark and bright. Spiders no bigger than freckles seemed to be doing important things under their bright green roofs--for only the under sides of the fronds were green and translucent: the fern on which the sun beat directly was no more green than Ynys's hair was black.... And the sunny parts of Ynys's arms were of the colour of a hayfield with much sorrel, while the round beneath was as cool as the under curve of a boat on the water.... It would have been part of the peace of that hot midday could he have dozed with his head in the crook of that arm. Of other desire to break its peace had he none. And Ynys? She had seen those fretted parasols of the fern, meshed and lacy and interpenetrating, a vast rug of whispering frondage--she had seen them, or their like, since they had been no more than tender, uncurling pastoral staffs, brown, with tiny inner crocketts not even green yet. She had watched them unfold their weak fingers--yes, from Lord Street, Liverpool, she had watched them unroll as a soft caterpillar unrolls. In a cool and darkened shop, with the floor always wet, she had seen, with those seaweed-coloured eyes, not the great queenly hydrangeas, nor the burning torches of the gladioli, nor the fat and scentless roses, nor the great half-pint pitchers of the arum lilies--she had seen, not these cold grandiflora, but the celandine and anemone of the hedge-bottoms, and the cool pennywort on the rocks, and the soft and imperceptible change, day by day, of those mountains many, many railway stations away. Those other great robed and wedding-dressed blooms? She had not considered them to be flowers. Flowers were the sappy bluebells she had pulled, white-stalked and squeaking, from the banks, receiving a penny for them--but not in exchange. She had sold the hydrangea-things without even seeing them. And her own weekly fifteen shillings of wages had not purchased a single glance of her eyes nor a single emotion of her heart.