ask roses as hung over the trellis, there never were such flaming
sunflowers, or pure white lilies as looked in at the sides. Squirrels
don't frequent garden bowers unless they are tamed and chained by the
leg. Our robin redbreasts are in the fields in summer, and do not perch
on boughs opposite speckled thrushes when they can get abundance of
worms and flies among the barley. We have not little green lizards at
large in England; the only one ever seen at Redwater was in the
apothecary's bottle. Still what a bower that is! What a blushing,
fluttering bower, trilling with song, glancing and glowing with the
bronze mail of beetles and the softened glory of purple emperors! What a
thing it was to examine; how you could look in and discover afresh, and
dwell for five minutes at a time on that hollow petal of a flower
steeped in honey, on that mote of a ladybird crawling to its couch of
olive moss.

Dulcie was speechless with admiration before this vision of Clarissa's
bower. Heigho! it was an enchanted bower to Dulcie as to Will Locke. It
was veritably alive to him, and he could tell her the secrets of that
life. What perfume the rose was shedding--he smelt it about his palette;
what hour of the clock the half-closed sunflower was striking; whence
the robin and the thrush had come, and what bean fields they had flown
over, and what cottage doors they had passed; of what the lizard was
dreaming in south or east as he turned over on his slimy side--all were
plain to him.

Ostensibly Dulcie was taking lessons from Will Locke in flower-painting,
for Dulcie had a delicate hand and a just eye for colours, and the
sweetest, natural fondness for this simple, common, beautiful world. And
Will Locke was a patient, indulgent teacher. He was the queerest mixture
of gentleness and stubbornness, shyness and confidence, reserve and
candour. He claimed little from other people, he exacted a great deal
from himself. He was the most retiring lad in society, backward and out
of place; he was free with Dulcie as a girl of her own stamp could be.
He had the most unhesitating faith in his own ability, he relied on it
as on an inspiration, he talked of it to Dulcie, he impressed it upon
her until he infected her with his own credulity until she believed him
to be one of the greatest painters under the sun. She credited his
strangest imagination, and that quiet lad had the fancy of a prince of
dreamers.

In the end Dulcie was humble and almost