.

And, lying there in the dark, she thought of their first meeting, one
Sunday morning, in Hyde Park. The Colonel religiously observed Church
Parade, and would even come all the way down to Westminster, from his
flat near Knightsbridge, in order to fetch his niece up to it. She
remembered how, during their stroll, he had stopped suddenly in front of
an old gentleman with a puffy yellow face and eyes half open.

"Ah! Mr. Heatherley--you up from Devonshire? How's your nephew
--the--er--sculptor?"

And the old gentleman, glaring a little, as it seemed to her, from under
his eyelids and his grey top hat, had answered: "Colonel Ercott, I think?
Here's the fellow himself--Mark!" And a young man had taken off his hat.
She had only noticed at first that his dark hair grew--not long--but very
thick; and that his eyes were very deep-set. Then she saw him smile; it
made his face all eager, yet left it shy; and she decided that he was
nice. Soon after, she had gone with the Ercotts to see his 'things'; for
it was, of course, and especially in those days, quite an event to know a
sculptor--rather like having a zebra in your park. The Colonel had been
delighted and a little relieved to find that the 'things' were nearly all
of beasts and birds. "Very interestin'" to one full of curious lore
about such, having in his time killed many of them, and finding himself
at the end of it with a curious aversion to killing any more--which he
never put into words.

Acquaintanceship had ripened fast after that first visit to his studio,
and now it was her turn to be relieved that Mark Lennan devoted himself
almost entirely to beasts and birds instead of to the human form,
so-called divine. Ah! yes--she would have suffered; now that she loved
him, she saw that. At all events she could watch his work and help it
with sympathy. That could not be wrong. . . .

She fell asleep at last, and dreamed that she was in a boat alone on the
river near her country cottage, drifting along among spiky flowers like
asphodels, with birds singing and flying round her. She could move
neither face nor limbs, but that helpless feeling was not unpleasant,
till she became conscious that she was drawing nearer and nearer to what
was neither water nor land, light nor darkness, but simply some
unutterable feeling. And then she saw, gazing at her out of the rushes
on the banks, a great bull head. It moved as she moved--it was on both
sides of her, yet all