the fair proportions of the meadowsweet-coloured panels and mouldings,
the polished floor, and the lofty and faintly starred ceiling, fairly
laughed their welcome. Oleron actually laughed back, and spoke aloud.

"Oh, you're pretty, pretty!" he flattered it.

Then he lay down on his couch.

He spent that afternoon as a convalescent who expected a dear visitor
might have spent it--in a delicious vacancy, smiling now and then as
if in his sleep, and ever lifting drowsy and contented eyes to his
alluring surroundings. He lay thus until darkness came, and, with
darkness, the nocturnal noises of the old house....

But if he waited for any specific happening, he waited in vain.

He waited similarly in vain on the morrow, maintaining, though with less
ease, that sensitised-plate-like condition of his mind. Nothing occurred
to give it an impression. Whatever it was which he so patiently wooed, it
seemed to be both shy and exacting.

Then on the third day he thought he understood. A look of gentle drollery
and cunning came into his eyes, and he chuckled.

"Oho, oho!... Well, if the wind sits in _that_ quarter we must see what
else there is to be done. What is there, now?... No, I won't send for
Elsie; we don't need a wheel to break the butterfly on; we won't go to
those lengths, my butterfly...."

He was standing musing, thumbing his lean jaw, looking aslant; suddenly