He would not often see Elise standing at the top of a flight of steps, balancing a white parasol over her sunny hair. Mr. Brett did not look at Elise with emotion, he was not an emotional man, but he looked at her with a prolonged attentiveness. Elise did not ask him any questions, but she became daily more and more conscious that change was in the air. She came out oftener to look at her father, to share his gentle prowls to the garden’s edge, and sit with him in the last patches of the retreating sun. Summer was drawing slowly to an end at Mambles, the colour of the garden had changed, the delicate, myriad shades of the flowers had singled and massed themselves into the hard and flaunting gold of sunflowers, dull mauves, and stalwart reds and browns. Only a bush of pale blue flax burned on as if it were still June. The birds were all about the sky, practising unendingly their migratory flights. They broke and clustered and spread open fans above the garden hedges, crying instead of singing their last songs. The garden at Mambles was full of their agitated wings and leave-takings. John alone noticed no sign of change, except in the weather, and Elise forbore to tell him of her premonitions. She had discovered that John did not like changes and that it was better to let them happen to him of their own accord than to prepare him for them with a prevision that might look like consent. Elise was no doubt very bad for men because she always altered herself to suit their conveniences. She never expected attention, and she made John feel that his wishes were a pleasure to her, and his tastes and habits part of the fixed laws of the universe. Nothing must stand between John and Yorkshire pudding with beef. She felt the same about her father, only with Mr. Brett it was horse-radish sauce. Elise went to Church regularly with Mr. Brett because he said he had come to the conclusion that religion should be like tobacco, got from an old firm and mild, but she told John quite truthfully that she loved to hear him read free-thinking books out loud on Sunday evenings. When John said that you could not be orthodox and honest simultaneously, Elise saw what he meant; and when Mr. Brett said very few men were honest anyway—even a first-class infidel rubbed all over by the higher criticisms could tell a lie at a pinch—Elise saw an equal significance in her father’s opinion. Nevertheless Elise had a mind of her own, she knew what was going to happen before anybody else did, and she never repeated facts which were inconvenient for other people to know unless it was absolutely necessary that they should know them. If Elise was more with her father than she had been before Hermione’s illness, John made up for it by being oftener with Hermione. John had been extremely impressed by Hermione’s illness. It struck him that nobody else realised how seriously ill she had been.