He stood watching Ethel, as she painted a flower upon a wooden panel, his head being inclined to one side. It was not long before Mr. Carden-Cox's call at the Grange that same afternoon. Ethel had a gift in the flower-painting line; but this was not done so well as usual. Ethel's fingers were nervous, not quite obedient. She had taken to her paints as a refuge from Tom, and there was no getting away from him. He followed her even into her pet sanctum, the little lumber-room, where, as she would have said, she "did her messes." It was no use to suggest his being elsewhere. Tom's mild good-humour was impervious to the broadest hints. Ethel felt for once uncontrollably cross in her satiety of Tom's talk; yet she tried to be patient. In a few days he would be gone. "One of the Umbelliferæ," repeated Tom, finding his information disregarded. "Umbel-bearing. Umbel—from the same source, so to speak, as 'umbrella'—spreading outward from the centre. This little flower is a simple umbel; but there are compound umbels also—umbels of umbels,—you understand?" "Oh yes. Like a lot of sunshades branching out of one umbrella." The illustration was so new, that Tom had to give it serious consideration. "Yes—" came slowly, at length. "I do not know that your idea is—altogether inappropriate. No, perhaps not—on the whole. As an instance of compound umbels, we have—a—" "An umbrella shop." "I am afraid that you would be pushing the—the simile—too far." Tom was perfectly serious. "As a matter of fact, an umbrella can never be other than a simple umbel—ha, ha!" Tom could always laugh at his own jokes, though never at those of other people. "Ha, ha! Yes, an umbrella is undoubtedly a simple umbel But in Nature we have compound umbels, as, for instance, the hemlock, the parsley, the—" Tom paused, and Ethel was silent. "You are making too much of a curve. That stalk does not bend in reality," said Tom, who looked upon the said stalk from a different standpoint, and failed to allow for the fact. He know about as much in respect of painting as the Rectory cat. A row of "flower-heads," with stalks as stiff as pokers in parallel lines below, would have seemed to him the correct thing. "Nature deals in curves. When she doesn't, it is a mistake, and art has to put her right," declared Ethel sententiously; for when dealing with a sententious man, one has sometimes to pay him in his own coin. Tom undertook to prove her mistaken, and Ethel listened with wandering thoughts to his laboured disquisition. It was hard to attend enough to prevent his discovering her absence. Her heart was at the Grange, for the last fortnight had been a severe trial of her fortitude, and each day added to the trial.