“You ’re still in the Domestic Office, then?” asked Shelton.

The stained-glass man stooped to sniff a rosebush.  “Yes,” he said; “it suits me very well.  I get lots of time for my art work.”

“That must be very interesting,” said Shelton, whose glance was roving for Antonia; “I never managed to begin a hobby.”

“Never had a hobby!” said the stained-glass man, brushing back his hair (he was walking with no hat); “why, what the deuce d’ you do?”

Shelton could not answer; the idea had never troubled him.

“I really don’t know,” he said, embarrassed; “there’s always something going on, as far as I can see.”

The stained-glass man placed his hands within his pockets, and his bright glance swept over his companion.

“A fellow must have a hobby to give him an interest in life,” he said.

“An interest in life?” repeated Shelton grimly; “life itself is good enough for me.”

“Oh!” replied the stained-glass man, as though he disapproved of regarding life itself as interesting.

“That’s all very well, but you want something more than that.  Why don’t you take up woodcarving?”

“Wood-carving?”

“The moment I get fagged with office papers and that sort of thing I take up my wood-carving; good as a game of hockey.”

“I have n’t the enthusiasm.”

The eyebrows of the stained-glass man twitched; he twisted his moustache.

“You ’ll find not having a hobby does n’t pay,” he said; “you ’ll get old, then where ’ll you be?”

It came as a surprise that he should use the words “it does n’t pay,” for he had a kind of partially enamelled look, like that modern jewellery which really seems unconscious of its market value.

“You’ve given up the Bar?  Don’t you get awfully bored having nothing to do?” pursued the stained-glass man, stopping before an ancient sundial.

Shelton felt a delicacy, as a man naturally would, in explaining that being in love was in itself enough to do.  To do nothing is unworthy of a man!  But he had never felt as yet the want of any occupation.  His silence in no way disconcerted his acquaintance.

“That’s a nice old article of virtue,” he said, pointing with his chin; and, walking round the sundial, he made its acquaintance from the other side.  Its grey profile cast a thin and shortening shadow on the turf; tongues of moss were licking at its sides; the daisies clustered thick around its base; it had acquired a look of growing from the soil.  “I should like to get hold of that,” the stained-glass man remarked; “I don’t know when I ’ve seen a better specimen,” and he walked round it once again.

His eyebrows were still ironically arched, but below them his eyes were almost calculating, and below them, again, his mouth had opened just a little.  A person with a keener eye would have said his face looked greedy, and even Shelton was surprised, as though he had read in the Spectator a confession of commercialism.