"Ah, but that thrush now," said she. "How did you do it? That is all I want to know." He laughed. "But that is exactly what I can't tell you," he said, "any more than you can tell me how it is that when you want to speak your tongue frames words. I ask it to come and sit on my finger--hardly even that. I know no more how I get it to come than it knows, the dear, why it comes." "And what else can you do?" continued Lady Ellington, abandoning for the present the idea of a class. Merivale got up without the least sign of impatience or ruffling of his good-humour. "I can show you over the house," he said, "or walk with you in the forest, as you are so kind as to take an interest in what I do and how I live, and, if you like, I will talk about the simple life and what we may call the approach to Nature. But I must warn you there is nothing in the least startling or sensational about it. Above all, as far as I know, it is not possible to make short cuts; one has to tune oneself slowly to it." This was better than nothing, for Lady Ellington had an excellent memory, and could recount all the things which Merivale told her as if she had suggested them to him and he had agreed. Also, if there was to be no simplification class, it would at least be in her power to say that he saw absolutely no one, but had been too charming in allowing Madge and her to come down and spend the day with him. Indeed, after a little reflection, she was not sure whether this was the more distinguished _rôle_, to be the medium between the Hermit and the rest of aspiring London. Thus it was with close attention that she made the tour of the cottage, and afterwards they walked up through the beech-wood on the other side of the stream on to the open heath beyond, to spend the afternoon on these huge, breezy uplands. Now, it so happened that on this morning Evelyn, after rather a sleepless, tossing night, had gone up to his studio after breakfast to find there that, when he tried to paint, he could not. Somebody, as he had said once before, had turned the tap off; no water came through, only a remote empty gurgling; the imaginative vision was out of gear. There were three or four pictures in his studio over which he might have spent a profitable morning, but he could do nothing with any of them. He had only the afternoon before thought out a background for the picture he was doing of Philip, thought it out, too, with considerable care and precision, and all he had to do was to set a few pieces of furniture, arrange his light as he wished it over the corner which was to be represented, and put it in. Yet he could not do anything with it; his eye was wrong, and his colours were harsh, crude, or merely woolly and unconvincing. He could not see things right; it seemed to him that what he painted was in the shadow, or as if something had come between him and his canvas.