ers, and thickheaded farmers,
was to her a bewilderment and annoyance.

She could not understand it, and she resented it. The real Iden she knew
was the man of thought and old English taste, who had told her so much
by the fireside of that very Shakespeare whom in features he resembled,
and of the poets from Elizabethan days downwards. His knowledge seemed
to be endless; there was no great author he had not read, no subject
upon which he could not at least tell her where to obtain information.
Yet she knew he had never had what is now called an education. How
clever he must be to know all these things! You see she did not know how
wonderful is the gift of observation, which Iden possessed to a degree
that was itself genius. Nothing escaped him; therefore his store was
great.

No other garden was planted as Iden's garden was, in the best of old
English taste, with old English flowers and plants, herbs and trees. In
summer time it was a glory to see: a place for a poet, a spot for a
painter, loved and resorted to by every bird of the air. Of a bare old
farmhouse he had made a beautiful home.

Questions upon questions her opening mind had poured upon him, and to
all he had given her an answer that was an explanation. About the earth
and about the sea, the rivers, and living things; about the stars and
sun, the comet, the wonders of the firmament, of geology and astronomy,
of science; there was nothing he did not seem to know.

A man who had crossed the wide ocean as that Ulysses of whom he read to
her, and who, like that Ulysses, enjoyed immense physical strength, why
was he like this? Why was he so poor? Why did he work in the rain under
a sack? Why did he gossip at the stile with the small-brained hamlet
idlers?

It puzzled her and hurt her at the same time.

I cannot explain why it was so, any better than Amaryllis; I could give
a hundred reasons, and then there would be no explanation--say partly
circumstances, partly lack of a profession in which talent would tell,
partly an indecision of character--too much thought--and, after all said
and done, Fate.

Watching him from the network window, Amaryllis felt her heart drooping,
she knew not why, and went back to her drawing unstrung.

She worked very hard, and worked in vain. The sketches all came back to
her. Some of them had a torn hole at the corner where they had been
carelessly filed, others a thumb-mark, others had been folded wrongly,
almost all smelt of