But to Shelton in this, as in all else, Antonia was what mattered.  At first, anxious to show her lover that she trusted him, she seemed never tired of doing things for his young protege, as though she too had set her heart on his salvation; but, watching her eyes when they rested on the vagabond, Shelton was perpetually reminded of her saying on the first day of his visit to Holm Oaks, “I suppose he ’s really good—­I mean all these things you told me about were only....”

Curiosity never left her glance, nor did that story of his four days’ starving leave her mind; a sentimental picturesqueness clung about that incident more valuable by far than this mere human being with whom she had so strangely come in contact.  She watched Ferrand, and Shelton watched her.  If he had been told that he was watching her, he would have denied it in good faith; but he was bound to watch her, to find out with what eyes she viewed this visitor who embodied all the rebellious under-side of life, all that was absent in herself.

“Dick,” she said to him one day, “you never talk to me of Monsieur Ferrand.”

“Do you want to talk of him?”

“Don’t you think that he’s improved?”

“He’s fatter.”

Antonia looked grave.

“No, but really?”

“I don’t know,” said Shelton; “I can’t judge him.”

Antonia turned her face away, and something in her attitude alarmed him.

“He was once a sort of gentleman,” she said; “why shouldn’t he become one again?”

Sitting on the low wall of the kitchen-garden, her head was framed by golden plums.  The sun lay barred behind the foliage of the holm oak, but a little patch filtering through a gap had rested in the plum-tree’s heart.  It crowned the girl.  Her raiment, the dark leaves, the red wall, the golden plums, were woven by the passing glow to a block of pagan colour.  And her face above it, chaste, serene, was like the scentless summer evening.  A bird amongst the currant bushes kept a little chant vibrating; and all the plum-tree’s shape and colour seemed alive.

“Perhaps he does n’t want to be a gentleman,” said Shelton.

Antonia swung her foot.

“How can he help wanting to?”

“He may have a different philosophy of life.”

Antonia was slow to answer.

“I know nothing about philosophies of life,” she said at last.

Shelton answered coldly,

“No two people have the same.”

With the falling sun-glow the charm passed off the tree.  Chilled and harder, yet less deep, it was no more a block of woven colour, warm and impassive, like a southern goddess; it was now a northern tree, with a grey light through its leaves.

“I don’t understand you in the least,” she said; “everyone wishes to be good.”

“And safe?” asked Shelton gently.

Antonia stared.

“Suppose,” he said—­“I don’t pretend to know, I only suppose—­what Ferrand really cares for is doing things differently from other people?  If you were to load him with a character and give him money on condition that he acted as we all act, do you think he would accept it?”