And there, in that sun-flooded court, I had a swift premonition. Something seemed to tell me that he was not going to paint it. Neither was he going to write about it, nor even to speak of it again. He had no wish to communicate it to any other person, by any means whatever. That he himself possessed the pure understanding of it was enough; he would not even care that any should know that he knew, so he might but have the bliss of knowing. His painting was over, as his writing was over. Contemplation, withdrawal, solitude, the infinite soft ecstasy of being at one with that which is not one self, though it were but the sunlight on a bit of fifteenth-century plaster--that, it now flashed suddenly on me, was what we might henceforward expect. And though he understood all mysteries, and had all knowledge, yet he now had something even richer to profit him. He had his Love. "I should very much like a cup of tea," said Madge. Instantly he was all graceful attention. The human desire for a cup of tea was equally a thing to be understood. "This glare does get in your eyes a bit," he smiled. "There's a nice shady place not five minutes away." As he led us back through the cloisters he all but took her arm. His place was gratefully shady. Through a small teashop one passed into a sort of leafy cage that, I learned, had at one time been an aviary. It was empty, and at a little rustic table against the trellis we sat down. "Would you mind ordering, Sir George?" he said. "This is one of my off-days for French, I'm afraid." I ordered tea. My new premonition proceeded to take still further possession of me. As he chatted with modest freedom to Madge I fell more and more into abstraction. I suppose that in all the circumstances it was my part to have taken charge of the conversation, to have guided it through the rocks and shoals of the difficult position, but I couldn't. Anyway he seemed quite capable of doing so. Capable? There was nothing of which he was not capable. And yet at the same time he was capable of nothing! For, supposing that my foreboding was right, what was his future? Isolation and Oblivion indeed! What man can live, sufficient unto himself, excommunicated from the world, wrapped in the vanity that he is not as others? Who dare dwell alone with Truth? Is it not our anchorage and our joy to run with our little half-truths in our hands and to thrust them upon our neighbour, that he may admire and share them with us? Who so great that some such littleness is not the very leaven of his life? Derwent Rose had written; Derwent Rose had painted; and now Derwent Rose would withdraw himself to some Tower, shut the door behind him, and be forgotten of men because their affairs were too small for him.... It was just as well that I was going to adopt him. What otherwise would his living be? In what corner of earth would he plant his cabbages and cherish his perfect and unprofitable knowledge?