Now, John Blanchemain, as I have previously mentioned, was an unselfconscious sort of fellow. In his unselfconsciousness, forgetting several trifles that might properly have weighed with him, (forgetting the tarnished gorgeousness of his Turkish slippers for example, and his towzled head, and the bathing-towel that flowed like a piece of classic drapery from his shoulder), obeying impulse and instinct, he flung himself into the breach. "Brutes," he muttered between his teeth. Then, in his easiest man-of-the-worldy accents, "If you can wait two minutes," he called aloud to her. And therewith he went scrambling down the terraces and picked his way from stone to stone across the shallows, to the field of anemones, where their satiny petals, like crisping wavelets, all a-ripple in the moving air, shimmered with constantly changing lights. And in a twinkling he had gathered a great armful, and was clambering back. "I beg of you," he said, in his abrupt fashion, holding them out to her, and slightly bowing, with that nothing-doubting assurance of his, while his blue eyes (to put her entirely at her ease) smiled, frank and friendly and serene, into her dark ones. But hers seemed troubled. She looked at the flowers, she looked at John, I think she even looked at her lira. Her eyes seemed undecided. "Do pray take them," said he, still smiling, still frank and assured, but as if a little puzzled, a little amused, by her hesitation, and more airily a man-of-the-world than ever, his tone one of high detachment, to spare her any possible feeling of personal obligation, and to place his performance in the light of a matter of course,--as if indeed he had done nothing more than pick up and return, say, a handkerchief she might have dropped. "You were right," he owned to his thought of Lady Blanchemain; "she is beautiful." Here, at close quarters with her, one's perception of her beauty became acute,--here, under the grey old trees, in the leafy dimness, alone with her, at two paces from her, where the birds sang and the violets gave forth their fragrant breath. He saw that her eyes were beautiful (soft and deep and luminous, despite their trouble), and her low white brow, and the dark masses of her hair, under her garden-hat, and the rose in her cheeks, and the red-rose of her mouth. And he saw and felt the beauty and the vitality of her strong young body. But meanwhile she had stretched forth, rather timidly, that ungloved fair hand of hers, and taken the flowers. "You are very good, I am sure. Thank you very much," she said, rather faintly, with a grave little inclination of the head.