From that hour when he had revealed to her the things deep and sacred, dark and despairing of his heart, and had gone forth from her sympathy aglow with a new-found faith in humanity, the bond between them was strengthened a thousandfold. Quixtus found that he could obtain not only swift response to his thoughts from a keen intelligence, but wide, undreamed of understanding of all those subtle workings of the spirit, regrets, hopes, judgments, prejudices, shrinkings, wonderings, impulses, which are too elusive to be thoughts, too vague to be emotions. And yet, she herself was never subtle. She was direct and uncompromising. As a shivering man enters a cosy room and warms himself before a blazing fire, so did he unquestioningly warm his heart in Clementina’s personality. And as the shivering man knows, without speculating, that the fire is intense and strong, so did he know that Clementina was intense and strong. All through the idyll of the remaining summer; he felt this more and more. She stood for something that he had missed in life, something that Angela, pale, passionless, negative reflection of himself, had never given him. She stood for richness, bigness, meaning. A simple man, not given to introspection or analysis of motive, new sensations, new realisations came to him as they come to a child and caused development. And among other impressions that deepened on his mind—and his was the mind of a scholar and dreamer, sweet and clean—was that of Clementina (now appearing to the world as God Almighty intended her to appear) as a physically fine and splendid creature. And, during all the summer idyll in the Manor House at Moleham-on-Thames, Clementina, in her uncompromising way, maintained the new phœnix’s plumage preened and shiny. The old habit of clawing at her hair while she was painting she circumvented by tying her head in an Angelica Kauffmann handkerchief. Tommy made her a present of one, in cardinal red, in which she flamed gipsy-like about the studio. Involuntarily, inevitably, the manner of all the men in her house-party, Quixtus, Huckaby, Admiral Concannon, Poynter (who spent a week-end), Tommy and Tommy’s cronies who came and went as they pleased, was tinged with a deference and a homage which made life a thing of meaning and delight. Sometimes a little scene like this would take place; To Clementina painting hard in the morning, enter the housekeeper. “Please, ma’am, we’ll soon be out of wine.” She would frown at the canvas. “Well, what of it?” “The gentlemen, ma’am.” “Oh, let them drink ginger-beer.” “Very well, ma’am.”