her, the first time she had seen him do so.
"You never mentioned your name, I think?"
"Joan Tregenza, sir."
"I promised you a little picture of that big ship, didn't I?"
"You was that kind, sir."
"Well, I haven't forgotten it. I finished the picture this morning and I think you may like it, but I had to leave it until to-morrow, because the paints take so long to dry."
"I'm sure I thank you kindly, sir."
"No need. To-morrow it will be quite ready for you, with a frame and all complete. You see I've begun to try and paint the gorse." He invited her by a gesture to view his work. She came closer, and as she bent he glanced up at her with his face for a moment close to hers. Then she drew back quickly, blushing.
"'Tis butivul—just like them fuzzes."
He had been working for two hours before she came, painting a small patch of the gorse. Old gnarled stems wound upward crookedly, and beneath them lay a dead carpet of gorse needles with a blade or two of grass shooting through. From the roots and bases of the main stems sprouted many a shoot of young gorse, their prickles tender as the claws of a new-born kitten, their shape, color, and foliage of thorns quite different to the mature plant above. There, in the main masses of the shrub, mossy brown buds in clumps foretold future splendor. But already much gold had burst the sheath and was ablaze, scenting the pure air, murmured over by many bees.
"You could a'most pick thicky theer flowers," declared Joan of the picture.
"Perhaps presently, when they are painted as I hope to paint them. This is only a rough bit of work to occupy my hand and eye while I am learning the gorse. Men who paint seriously have to learn trees and blossoms just as they have to learn faces. And we are never satisfied. When I have painted this gorse, with its thorns and buds, I shall sigh for more truth. I cannot paint the soul of each little yellow flower that opens to the sun; I cannot paint the sunny smell that is sweet in our nostrils now. God's gorse scents the air; mine will only smell of fat oil. What shall I do?"
"I dunnaw."
"No more does anybody. It can't be helped. But I must try my best and make it real—each spike, as I see it—the dead gray ones on the ground and the live green ones on the tree, and the baby ones and the old gray-pointed ones, which have seen their best days and will presently die and fall—I must paint them all, Joan."
She laughed.
"Don't laugh," he said, very seriously. "Only an artist would laugh at me, not you who love Nature. There lives a great painter, Joan, who paints pictures that nobody else in the wide world can paint. He is growing old, but he is not too old to take trouble still. Once, when he was a young man, he drew a lemon-tree far away in Italy. It was only a little lemon-tree, but the artist rose morning after morning and drew it leaf by leaf, twig by twig, until every leaf and bud and lemon and bough had appeared. It was not labored and false; it was grand because it was true: a joy forever; work Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost Oriental. A thing, Joan Tregenza, worth a wilderness of 'harmonies' and 'impressions,' 'nocturnes' and 'notes,' smudges and audacities. But I suppose that is all gibberish to you?"
"Iss, so it be," she admitted.
"Learn to love everything that is beautiful, my good child. But I think you do, unconsciously perhaps."
"I don't take much 'count of things." "Yes, unconsciously. You have a cowslip there stuck in your frock, though where you got it from I can't imagine. The flower is a month too early."
"Iss, 'tis, I found en in a lew, sunshiny plaace. Us have got a frame for growin' things under glass, an' it had bin put down 'pon top this cowslip an' drawed 'en up."
"Will you give it to me?"
She did so, and he smelled it.
"D'you know that the green of the cowslip is the most beautiful green in all Nature, Joan? Here, I have a flower, too; we will exchange if you like."
He took a scrap of blackthorn bloom from his coat and held it out to her, but she shrank backward and he learned something.
"Please not that—truly 'tis the dreadfulest wicked flower. Doan't 'e arsk
I to take en."
"Unlucky?"
"Iss fay! Him or her as first brings blackthorn in the house dies afore it blows again. Truth—solemn—us all knaws it down in these paarts. 'Tis a bewitched thing—a wicked plant, an' you can see it grawin' all humpetty-backed an' bent an' crooked. Wance, when a man killed hisself, they did use to bury en wheer roads met an' put a blackthorn stake through en; an' it all us grawed arter; an' that's the worstest sort o' all."
"Dear, dear, I'm glad you told me, Joan; I will not wear it, nor shall you," he said, and flung it down and stamped on it very seriously.
The girl was gratified.
"I judge you'm a furriner, else you'd knawn 'bout the wickedness o' blackthorn."
"I am. Thank you very much. But for you I should have gone home wearing it.
That puts me in your debt, Joan."
"'Tain't nothin', awnly there's a many coorious Carnish things like that.
An' coorious customs what some doan't hold with an' some does."
She sat down near the cliff edge with her back to him, and he smiled to himself to find how quickly his mild manners and reserve had put the girl at her ease. She looked perfect that afternoon and he yearned to begin painting her; but his scheme of action demanded time for its perfect fulfillment and ultimate success. He let the little timorous chatterbox talk. Her voice was soft and musical as the cooing of a wood-dove, and the sweet full notes chimed in striking contrast to her uncouth speech. But Joan's diction gave pleasure to the listener. It had freedom and wildness, and was almost wholly innocent of any petrifying educational influences.
Joan, for her part, felt at ease. The man was so polite and so humble. He thanked her for her information so gratefully. Moreover, he evidently cared so little about her or her looks. She felt perfectly safe, for it was easy to see that he thought more of the gorse than anything.
"My faither's agin such things an' sayin's," she babbled on, "but I dunnaw. They seems truth to me, an' to many as is wiser than what I be. My mother b'lieved in 'em, an' Joe did, till faither turned en away from 'em. But when us plighted troth, I made en jine hands wi' me under a livin' spring o' water, though he said 'twas heathenish. Awnly, somehow, I knawed 'twas a proper thing to do."
"I should like to hear more about these old customs some day," he said, as though Joan and he were to meet often in the future, "and I should be obliged to you for telling me about them, because I always delight in such matters."
She was quicker of mind than he thought, and rose, taking his last remark as a hint that he wished to be alone.
"Don't go, Joan, unless you must. I'm a very lonely man, and it is a great pleasure to me to hear you talk. Look here."
She approached him, and he showed her a pencil sketch now perched on the easel—a drawing
