His wallet contained a number of specimens; he plucked up the little plant by the root, and stowed it away.  I watched him with curiosity.  Perhaps I had seen only his public side; perhaps even then he was capable of dressing roughly, and of rambling for his pleasure among fields and wood.  But such a possibility had never occurred to me.  I wondered whether his brilliant wife had given him a disgust for the ways of town.  If so, he was a more interesting man than I had supposed.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked, after a glance this way and that.

I named the village, two miles away.

‘Working?’

‘Idling merely.’

In a few minutes he overcame his reserve and began to talk of the things which he knew interested me.  We discussed the books of the past season, the exhibitions, the new men in letters and art.  Ireton said that he had been living at a wayside inn for about a week; he thought of moving on, and, as I had nothing to do, suppose he came over for a few days to the village where I was camped?  I welcomed the proposal.

’There’s an inn, I dare say?  I like the little inns in this part of the country.  Dirty, of course, and the cooking hideous; but it’s pleasant for a change.  I like to be awoke by the cock crowing, and to see the grubby little window when I open my eyes.’

I began to suspect that he had come down in the world.  Could his prosperity have been due to Mrs. Treton?  Had she carried off the money?  He might affect a liking for simple things when grandeur was no longer in his reach.  Yet I remembered that he had undoubtedly been botanising before he knew of my approach, and such a form of pastime seemed to prove him sincere.

By chance I witnessed his arrival the next morning.  He drove up in a farmer’s trap, his luggage a couple of large Gladstone-bags.  That day and the next we spent many hours together.  His vanity, though not outgrown, was in abeyance; he talked with easy frankness, yet never of what I much desired to know, his own history and present position.  It was his intellect that he revealed to me.  I gathered that he had given much time to study during the past three years, and incidentally it came out that he had been living abroad; his improved pronunciation of the names of French artists was very noticeable.  At his age—­not less than forty-five—­this advance argued no common mental resources.  Whether he had suffered much, I could not determine; at present he seemed light-hearted enough.

Certainly there was no affectation in his pursuit of botany; again and again I saw him glow with genuine delight when he had identified a plant.  After all, this might be in keeping with his character, for even in the old days he had never exhibited—­at all events to me—­a taste for the ignobler luxuries, and he had seemed to me a very clean-minded man.  I never knew any one who refrained so absolutely from allusion, good or bad, to his friends or acquaintances.  He might have stood utterly alone in the world, a simple spectator of civilisation.