“Will she let me make love to her? Will she let me?” was the burden of his thought; and as he stared at that bunch of flowers, especially at one solitary bluebell that hung down over the brim of the white bowl and had gathered a tinge of faint rose-carmine upon its hyacinthine bloom, he felt as though the “to be or not to be” of that tense moment depended upon chance as inscrutable, as fluctuating, as the light, falling this way, falling that way⁠—light and shadow wavering together⁠—upon that purple-blue at the bowl’s edge.

Never had he been more aware of the miracle of flower-petals, of the absolute wonder of this filmy vegetable fabric, so much older, just as it is so much more lovely, in the history of our planet than the flesh of beasts or the feathers of birds or the scales of fishes!

The girl’s words, “I sent Darnley away,” seemed to melt into that wildflower bunch she had picked and placed there; and the pallor of the primroses, the perilous, arrowy faintness of their smell, became his desire for her; and the rough earth-mould freedom of the campion-stalks, with their wood-sturdy pink buds, became the lucky solitude she had made for him!