Dangelis felt an exquisite sense of new possibilities in his art, drawn from the seduction of these surroundings and the frank animalism of his cheerful companions. He sat between them, watching their looks and ways, very much as Rubens or Franz Hals might have watched the rounded bosoms and spacious gestures of two admirable burgess-women in some country house of Holland. Mrs. Romer, below her garrulous chatter, nourished fantastic and rose-colored dreams, in which inestimable piles of dollars, and limitless rows of golden haired grand-children, played the predominant part. Gladys, flushed and excited, gave herself up to the imagined exercise of every sort of wanton and wilful power, with the desire for which the flowing sap of the year’s exuberance filled her responsive veins. Tea over, Dangelis suggested that he should accompany the girl to Mr. Clavering’s door. “You needn’t be there for three quarters of an hour,” he said, “let’s go across to the mill copse first, and see if there are any blue-bells left.” Gladys willingly consented, and Susan Romer, remaining pensive in her low cane chair, watched their youthful figures retreating across the sunlit park with a sigh of profound thankfulness addressed vaguely and obscurely to Omnipotence. This was indeed the sort of son-in-law she craved. How much more desirable than that reserved and haughty young Ilminster! Gladys would be, three times over, a fool if she let him escape. A few minutes later the artist and his girl-friend reached the mill spinney. He helped her over the stream and the black thorn hedge without too much damage to her frock and he was rewarded for his efforts by the thrill of vibrating pleasure with which she plunged her hands among the oozy stalks of those ineffable blue flowers. “No wonder young Hyacinth was too beautiful to live,” he remarked. “Shut up,” was the young woman’s reply, as she breathlessly stretched herself along the length of a fallen branch, and endeavoured to reach the damp moist stalks and cool leaves with her forehead and lips. “How silly it is, having one’s hair done up,” she cried presently, raising herself on her hands from her prone position, and kicking the branch viciously with her foot. “You’d have liked me with my hair down, Mr. Dangelis,” she continued. “Lying like this,” and she once more embraced the fallen bough, “it would have got mixed up with all those blue-bells and then you _would_ have had something to paint!” “Bad girl!” cried the artist playfully, switching her lightly with a willow wand from which he had been stripping the bark. “I would have made you do your hair up, tight round your head, years and years ago.” He offered her his hand and lifted her up. Once in possession of those ardent youthful fingers, he seemed to consider himself justified in retaining them and, as the girl made no sign of dissent, they advanced hand in hand through the thick undergrowth.