He seemed to see a shiver pass through her slight shoulders, and he changed the subject at once.  The Carton motor should come for her and her sister, he said, whenever they liked, the following Saturday afternoon.  The run would take about an hour.  Meanwhile—­

‘Do you want any more books or magazines?’ he asked her smiling, with the look of one only eager to be told how to serve her.  They had paused in the road outside the lodgings.

‘Oh I how could we!  You sent us such a bundle!’ cried Nelly gratefully.  ’We are always finding something new in it.  It makes the evenings so different.  We will bring them back when we come.’

’Don’t hurry.  And go on with the drawing.  I shall expect to see it a great deal further on next time.  It’s all right so far.’

He went his way back, speedily, taking a short cut over Loughrigg to his cottage.  His thoughts, as he climbed, were very full of Mrs. Sarratt.  But they were the thoughts of an artist—­of a man who had studied beauty, and the European tradition of beauty, whether in form or landscape, for many years; who had worked—­a contre coeur—­in a Paris studio, and had copied Tintoret—­fervently—­in Venice; who had been a collector of most things, from Tanagra figures to Delia Robbias.  She made an impression upon him in her lightness and grace, her small proportions, her lissomness of outline, very like that of a Tanagra figure.  How had she come to spring from Manchester?  What kindred had she with the smoke and grime of a great business city?  He fell into amused speculation.  Manchester has always possessed colonies of Greek merchants.  Somewhere in the past was there some strain of southern blood which might account for her?  He remembered a beautiful Greek girl at an Oxford Commemoration, when he had last attended that function; the daughter of a Greek financier settled in London, whose still lovely mother had been drawn and painted interminably by the Burne Jones and William Morris group of artists. She was on a larger scale than Mrs. Sarratt, but the colour of the flesh was the same—­as though light shone through alabaster—­and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes.  Moreover she had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of nature, a creature of impulse and passion—­passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive—­through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control.  ’This little creature is only at the beginning of her life’—­he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness.  ’What the deuce will she have made of it, by the end?  Why should such beings grow old?’