Joan’s heart had opened to the thousand voices of her flowers. She was in a golden mood, sad, yet happy—the mood of one who lives in dreams and forgets the present. The greater burden of the day had been passed with her father; she had found him more human for the nonce, less gray and barbarous. Bodily he was much like a withered leaf that had mouldered to a lacelike skeleton, a traceried image of itself. During the early summer he had weakened, maintaining none the less his mercenary acumen of mind, that like a red spark fed still upon the rotten tinder of the flesh. He was much abed now; his cottages at Rilchester had not tumbled their rents into his leather bag these many months. An agent fingered the blue-leaved ledger and harvested pence in that provincial slum. Joan had been reading of Britomart, that woman queening it in the pages of romance. This British heroine had ever had a strong hold on the child Joan’s heart, an idyllic foster-mother, pure and fearless. Even now, in the deeper wisdom of her wounded days, the girl had found in this fair woman of legendary lore a sister quickened with a kindred sympathy. Perhaps there was a suggestive moral in the legend that had startled Joan like the sudden voice of one singing in the woods. She remembered that Artegal the Just had proved vincible, a god of clay with a heart of gold. Despite his manhood, he had fallen into unheroic jeopardy, even to the quaint ignominy of wearing women’s gear. And it had needed Britomart to end his shame. Whatever mysterious philosophies were moving in her heart, the girl was doomed to discover scope for heroism that evening. Up the narrow lane circling the hill-side a man was urging a jaded horse, slouching low in the saddle. The western light smote upon his face, making it white and ethereal, like the face of one who had risen from a sick-bed. Drawing rein before the iron gate and rolling out of the saddle, he tethered his horse and passed up the darkening drive. The gravel complained beneath his feet. Reaching the porch, he set the bell clanging through the solitary house, mocking, metallic laughter that died in a rattling chuckle. Anon, as he stamped restlessly to and fro, the door opened, and Mrs. Primmer’s stony face stared at him out of the dusk of the hall. Gabriel saw her lips tighten as she looked him over. There was a new significance for him in the steel of her observant eyes. She snapped the words out of her narrow mouth, forestalling his question with an intelligence that was almost insolent. “Miss Joan’s in the garden.” The man turned away with a clinched jaw and a hot color. There was something sinister even in the tone of the woman’s voice, a hint at knowledge that brimmed his cup of bitterness the more. The children of Mammon had proved wiser than he in their generation. Like an idealist in hades, he was mocked by the scoffing shades of the grossly wise dead.