‘Nature excites me sometimes,’ he said presently. ‘I suppose it’s because I’ve known nothing else.’ ‘That’s quite natural, I’m sure, Paul dear,’ she rejoined, turning to lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; ‘it’s very pretty; I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.’ ‘Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need of my being certainly.’ He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter absence of comprehension. ‘In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I had no idea you were clever like that.’ She was perfectly sincere in what she said. Her brother blushed like a boy. ‘It’s my foolishness, I suppose, Margaret,’ he said with a shy laugh. ‘I am certainly not clever.’ ‘Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart’s content. You must use the place as though it were your own exactly.’ ‘Thank you, Margaret.’ ‘Only I don’t think I quite understand all those things,’ she added vaguely after a pause. ‘Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor Dick’s ideas and strange fancies. I really can’t keep up with her at all.’ Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good intentions. ‘She comes down to this wood far too much, and I’m sure it’s not quite healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.’ Then she turned to him and smiled. ‘But they are all so excited about your coming. They will simply devour you.’ ‘I’m a poor hand at children, I’m afraid,’ he said, falling back upon his usual formula, ‘but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.’ She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now, there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator. Yet he could love her, and he meant to.