he subject of Lady Winterbourne's
numerous family, which was clearly meant for a _tete-a-tete_.

"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour,
after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her
walk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my
grandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier than
this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept
him an unconscionable time."

Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room
where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the
wall from side to side.

"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What a
delicious thing to live with."

And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints,
suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in
flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses.
Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and
pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled
and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It
was Italy at the great moment--subtle, rich, exuberant.

Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.

"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my special
delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a
garret. I am not sure that I don't in my heart prefer it to any of the
pictures."

"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it--"look at them--the irises,
the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to have
when one was small of what it would be like to have _flowers enough_. I
was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always
cheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, and
I found one here and one there--but such a beggarly, wretched few, for
all one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself
by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this--yes, just like
this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one's
hands in and gather and gather till one was really _satisfied_! That is
the worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough of
anything. One day it's flowers--but the next day it is pudding--and the
next frocks."

Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant to
feel herself beside him,