“During the day I am generally out, so you will be able to have the room entirely to yourself,” he rejoined, in his own disconcerting manner, and the candle he was holding seemed to her to light up a little flicker of something like amusement in his eyes. “Yes, I know,” she said, desperately, “at that place in the woods where I first met you. Has the foxglove grown again? I wanted to ask you. I shall come and see for myself some day.” She spoke with an assumed archness, with all the while a fearful stricture about the heart, lest she was alienating him by her boldness as of the schoolgirl she believed him to believe her to be. Her candlestick, which she had now taken from his hand, trembled in her own. “Do!” he replied, civilly, in a tone absolutely devoid of all enthusiasm. Jane Anne crossed the hall as they loosed their hands. “And now, good-night!” Mrs. Elles waited a whole day before she profited by the artist’s invitation to visit him at the place where he worked. She was rewarded for her discretion, for, at dinner that very evening, he asked her coolly why she had not been? So, the day after, she walked over to Brignal and stayed full fifteen minutes at his side. She managed to be so little of a nuisance that, next day, she was emboldened to take over her drawing materials at the artist’s own suggestion, and began a series of minute and painstaking sketches of the vegetation of the immediate foreground, to be used by him afterwards as memoranda. He had admitted that it would be useful to him. Then it became a settled thing that she should walk over every day after twelve o’clock, and take him his letters and the papers which were left at the “Heather Bell” by the postman from Barnard Castle quite an hour after his departure. Thus the compromising fact of her own total dearth of correspondence escaped his attention, if, indeed, he should take cognizance of such a detail.