Canterton went about for the rest of the day with a picture of a dark-haired woman with a sensitive face sitting at a white framed Georgian window, and looking out upon Latimer Green where all the red-tiled roofs were dull and wet, and the rain rustled upon the foliage of the Latimer elms. He could imagine Eve drawing those pen-and-ink sketches for Lynette, with a glimmer of fun in her eyes, and her lips smiling. She was seventy miles away, and yet——He found himself wondering whether her thoughts had reached out to him while she was writing that letter to Lynette. At Latimer the rain was the mere whim of a day, a silver veil let down on the impulse and tossed aside again with equal capriciousness. Eve was deep in the Latimer gardens, painting from nine in the morning till six at night, taking her lunch and tea with her, and playing the gipsy under a blue sky. Save for that one wet day the weather was perfect for studies of vivid sunlight and dense shadow. Latimer Abbey set upon its hill-side, with the dense woods shutting out the north, seemed to float in the very blue of the summer sky. There was no one in residence, and, save for the gardeners, Eve had the place to herself, and was made to feel like a child in a fairy story, who discovers some enchanted palace all silent and deserted, yet kept beautiful by invisible hands. As she sat painting in the upper Italian garden with its flagged walks, statues, brilliant parterres, and fountains, she could not escape from a sense of enchantment. It was all so quiet, and still, and empty. The old clock with its gilded face in the turret kept smiting the hours with a quaint, muffled cry, and with each striking of the hour she had a feeling that all the doors and windows of the great house would open, and that gay ladies in flowered gowns, and gentlemen in rich brocades would come gliding out on to the terrace. Gay ghosts in panniers and coloured coats, powdered, patched, fluttering fans, and cocking swords, quaint in their stilted stateliness. The magic of the place seemed to flow into her work, and perhaps there was too much mystery in the classic things she painted. Some strange northern god had breathed upon the little sensuous pictures that should have suggested the gem-like gardens of Pompeii. Clipped yews and box trees, glowing masses of mesembryanthemum and pelargonium, orange trees in stone vases, busts, statues, masks, fountains and white basins, all the brilliancy thereof refused to be merely sensuous and delightful. There was something over it, a spirituality, a slight mistiness that softened the materialism. Eve knew what she desired to paint, and yet something bewitched her hands, puzzled her, made her dissatisified. The Gothic spirit refused to be conjured, refused to suffer this piece of brilliant formalism to remain untouched under the thinner blue of the northern sky.