The morning that followed this conversation was as warm as the preceding ones, but a strong southern wind had risen, with a remote touch of the sea in its gusty violence. The trees in the park, as the artist and his girl-friend watched them from the terrace, while Mr. Romer, who had now returned from town worked in his study, and Lacrima helped Mrs. Romer to “do the flowers,” swayed and rustled ominously in the eddying gusts. Clouds of dust kept blowing across the gates from the surface of the drive and the delphiniums bent low on their long stalks. The wind was of that peculiar character which, though hot and full of balmy scents, conveys a feeling of uneasiness and troubled expectation. It suggested thunder and with and beyond that, something threatening, calamitous and fatal. Gladys was preoccupied and gloomy that morning. She was growing a little, just a little, tired of the American’s conversation. Even the excitement of arranging about the purchase in Yeoborough of suitable materials for her Ariadne costume did not serve to lift the shadow from her brow. She was getting tired of her rôle as the naive, impetuous and childish innocent; and though mentally still quite resolved upon following her mother’s frequent and unblushing hints, and doing her best to “catch” this æsthetic master of a million dollars, the burden of the task was proving considerably irksome. Ralph’s growing tendency to take her into his confidence in the matter of the philosophy of his art, she found peculiarly annoying. Philosophy of any kind was detestable to Gladys, and this particular sort of philosophy especially depressed her, by reducing the attraction of physical beauty to a kind of dispassionate analysis, against the chilling virtue of which all her amorous wiles hopelessly collapsed. It was becoming increasingly difficult, too, to secure her furtive interviews with Luke--interviews in which her cynical sensuality, suppressed in the society of the American, was allowed full swing. Her thoughts, at this very moment, turned passionately and vehemently towards the young stone-carver, who had achieved, at last, the enviable triumph of seriously ruffling and disturbing her egoistic self-reliance. Unused to suffering the least thwarting in what she desired, it fretted and chafed her intolerably to be forced to go on playing her coquettish part with this good-natured but inaccessible admirer, while all the time her soul yearned so desperately for the shameless kisses that made her forget everything in the world but the ecstacy of passion. It was all very well to plan this posing as Ariadne and to listen to Dangelis discoursing on the beauty of pagan myths. The artist might talk endlessly about dryads and fauns. The faun she longed to be pursued by, this wind-swept morning, was now engaged in hammering Leonian stone, in her father’s dusty work-shops.