ite a big garden," said Sir Isaac.

Sec.2

And so the woman who had been a girl three weeks ago, this tall,
dark-eyed, slightly perplexed and very young-looking lady, was
introduced to the home that had been made for her. She went about it
with an alarmed sense of strange responsibilities, not in the least
feeling that anything was being given to her. And Sir Isaac led her from
point to point full of the pride and joy of new possession--for it was
his first own house as well as hers--rejoicing over it and exacting
gratitude.

"It's all right, isn't it?" he asked looking up at her.

"It's wonderful. I'd no idea."

"See," he said, indicating a great brass bowl of perennial sunflowers on
the landing, "your favourite flower!"

"My favourite flower?"

"You said it was--in that book. Perennial sunflower."

She was perplexed and then remembered.

She understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at a
big photographic enlargement of a portrait of Doctor Barnardo, "your
favourite hero in real life."

He had brought her at Hythe one day a popular Victorian device, a
confession album, in which she had had to write down on a neat
rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her
favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her "pet aversion,"
and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. She
had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was
disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home
to roost. She had put down "pink" as her favourite colour because the
page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was
pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and
tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the
pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery--everything but
the omnipresent perennial sunflowers--was pink. Confronted with this
realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all
possible hues for a bedroom. She perceived she had to live now in a
chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. She had said
that her favourite musical composers were Bach and Beethoven; she really
meant it, and a bust of Beethoven materialized that statement, but she
had made Doctor Barnardo her favourite hero in real life because his
name also began with a B and she had heard someone say somewhere that he
was a very good man. The predo