se confusedly on the
table. "Now," he said, "come and try to eat."

"It's very good of you to bother," she said, a little surprise in her
tone, for she had expected "lunch" to be a set formal meal at which some
discreet female relative would preside. "But aren't you--don't you--do
you live alone, then?"

"Yes, a woman comes in in the mornings. I'm sorry she's gone: she could
have arranged a better lunch for you."

"Better? why, it's lovely!" said she, accepting the situation with frank
amusement, and she gave a touch or two to the table to set everything in
its place.

Then they lunched together. He would have served her standing, as one
serves a queen--but she laughed again, and he took the place opposite
her. During lunch they talked.

After lunch they mended the punctured tyre, and talked all the while;
then it was past three o'clock.

"You won't go yet," he said then, daring greatly for what seemed to him
a great stake. "Let me make you some tea--I can, I assure you--and let
us see if the tyre holds up----"

"Oh, the tyre is all right, thanks to your cleverness----"

"Well, then," said he desperately, "take pity on a poor hermit! I give
you my word, I have been here ten months and three days, and I have not
in that time spoken a single word to any human being except my
bedmaker."

"But if you want to talk to people why did you begin being a hermit?"

"I thought I didn't, then."

"Well--now you know better, why don't you come back and talk to people
in the ordinary way?"

This was the first and last sign she gave that the circumstances in
which she found herself with him were anything but ordinary.

"I have a book to finish," said he. "Would you like to have tea in the
wilderness or in here?" He wisely took her consent for granted this
time, and his wisdom was justified.

They had tea in the garden. The wilderness blossomed like a rose, to
Maurice's thinking. In his mind he was saying over and over again: "How
bored I must have been all this time! How bored I must have been!"

It seemed to him that his mind was opening, like a flower, and for the
first time. He had never talked so well, and he knew it--all the seeds
of thought, sown in those long, lonely hours, bore fruit now. She
listened, she replied, she argued and debated.

"Beautiful--and sensible," said Maurice to himself. "What a wonderful
woman!" There was, besides, an alertness of mind, a quick brightness of
manner that charmed him. Cami