Phyllys spoke warmly. Dinner was over, and she and Mrs. Keith had quitted the dining-room, leaving Giles with Mr. Dugdale, this evening, as often, a self-invited guest. Mrs. Keith was gone to her boudoir, and Phyllys found Colin in the drawing-room. He had been three days invisible, prostrate with headache, and she had been told that he could not appear this evening. Here, however, he was, in the deep armchair, close to the oriel window. He stood up when she came in, despite an eager "Oh, don't!" but was glad to go back. She sat down and scanned the ivory-tinted face. "Ought you to have come down?" she asked, as one hand was pressed slowly over the fair hair, its slender fingers perceptibly thinner for three days of starvation and intense pain. "Thanks, I'm all right now." She glanced at a book on his knee, half-open, his hand between the leaves. "Have you been trying to read?" "Not much. There's a paragraph by Kingsley that I thought you might like." "May I see it?" She took the book and read eagerly the sentence indicated:— "'Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God's handwriting; a wayside Sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank for it Him, the Fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with 'all' your eyes. It is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.'" Phyllys's own face was very fair with thoughts evoked. "I'm glad you've shown me that. It is just what one wants to feel—to do. If beauty really is—that—one can't be wrong in loving it." "One might rather be wrong not to value it," he suggested. "But—" and a pause—"there are ugly things in Nature." "Many things that we stamp as ugly are not so. Part of our condemnation is conventional. Part is due to imperfect sight. We don't detect the exquisite finish—or the balancing of parts. What looks to us like ugliness may belong merely to roughness of outline, due to our blindness. Then, too, we fail to make out the true inwardness. The beauty of Divine handwriting may be there, yet the key is wanting, and we can't translate into the vernacular." "You wouldn't say that there is beauty in everything!" "No. But there is an enormous amount more of it than men see. It needs a trained eye and a brain awake. Form and colour are lost upon those who are Nature-blind and Art-blind. And for the most part you will find unlovely outlines—hardness, stiffness, angularity—in human conceptions, not in Divine." "You like flat surfaces in sculpture," she suggested with quickness. "Flat surfaces in sculpture—and in Nature—don't mean the rigid flatness of a sheet of iron. There are delicate mouldings—roundings—the melting, so to speak, of one surface into another. Nature's divisions, like Nature's tints, merge by gradations. You don't find squares and oblongs. In a rainbow no man living can define where one colour ends and the next begins."