She stopped and stood still, and pushed her spectacles, which she had been wearing very laxly, a little further up her forehead. “This is like a glimpse of Paradise,” she thought, looking towards the golden space in front of her, “coming as it does, just after this long, cool dark grove that I have been walking in for more than half an hour! That was a kind of Purgatorio. This is a painter’s paradise, I might say, and there is the painter!” For very nearly under her feet--she was half-way up the sloping bank that sheltered this little oasis on the south--was the white calico umbrella planted on its spiked stick, like a gigantic mushroom, which Mrs. Elles was well-informed enough to associate at once with the painter’s craft. The painter was, of course, seated on his camp-stool under it, and she looked down on the back of his sunburnt neck and noticed the way his hair curled a little on it. One rash step would bring her down on him in a helpless rush, for she was not an expert climber and her steps were rendered precarious by the crumbly nature of the soil on which she stood. She settled her spectacles firmly on her nose--“I shall probably fall and break them into my eyes, but it can’t be helped!” and began to skirt round to the left, intending to make a circuit of the umbrella and approach the artist from the front. She had a wild desire to speak to someone. She had actually not opened her lips since ten o’clock that morning, and she was a woman hardly cast by nature for the part of a Trappist! In this lonely place, the least a man could do would be to wish her good day! Then she might possibly go so far as to ask him to tell her the name of the place where she found herself, and a pleasant conversation would thereby be inaugurated. She worked gradually round to him--how ugly the world looked through the wall of cold blue in front of her eyes!--and the continuous ripple of the water, flowing over the many obstacles and narrow channels of its bed, effectually drowned the noise of the snapping of dry twigs and the breaking of pulpy burdock stalks that attended her clumsy progress. She was almost in front of him--a few yards off only--but he had not raised his head. He did so presently, in the natural course of things, and she made a step forward. “For God’s sake, mind that foxglove!” he shouted, but, even as he spoke, it was doomed and the splendid column of pink bells fell prone to the ground. She stood aghast. “I beg your pardon!” he said, in a tone as civil as was consistent with the most obvious and excessive irritation, “but do you know you have completely ruined my foreground?” “I beg your pardon--oh, ten thousand times!” she replied, ruefully surveying the snapped stem of the injured flower. “But it will grow again, won’t it?” “Not that one--not this summer--and it came in just right! Well, well; it can’t be helped.... Please don’t apologise!... It is no matter.”