‘The way in which you speak of your father interests me,’ said Wilfrid, leaning his chin upon his hand, and gazing at her freely.  ’You seem so united with him in sympathy.’

She did not turn her eyes to him, but her face gathered brightness.

‘In sympathy, yes,’ she replied, speaking now with more readiness.  ’Our tastes often differ, but we are always at one in feeling.  We have been companions ever since I can remember.’

‘Is your mother living?’

‘Yes.’

Something in the tone of the brief affirmative kept Wilfrid from further questioning.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ’what you think of the relations existing between myself and my father.  We are excellent friends, don’t you think?  Strange—­one doesn’t think much about such things till some occasion brings them forward.  Whether there is deep sympathy between us, I couldn’t say.  Certainly there are many subjects on which I should not dream of speaking to him unless necessity arose; partly, I suppose, that is male reserve, and partly English reserve.  If novels are to be trusted, French parents and children speak together with much more freedom; on the whole that must be better.’

She made no remark.

‘My father,’ he continued, ’is eminently a man of sense if I reflect on my boyhood, I see how admirable his treatment of me has always been.  I fancy I must have been at one time rather hard to manage; I know I was very passionate and stubbornly self-willed.  Yet he neither let me have my own way nor angered me by his opposition.  In fact, he made me respect him.  Now that we stand on equal terms, I dare say he has something of the same feeling towards myself.  And So it comes that we are excellent friends.’

She listened with a scarcely perceptible smile.

’Perhaps this seems to you a curiously dispassionate way of treating such a subject,’ Wilfrid added, with a laugh.  ’It illustrates what I meant in saying I doubted whether there was deep sympathy between us.  Your own feeling for your father is clearly one of devotedness.  You would think no sacrifice of your own wishes too great if he asked it of you.’

’I cannot imagine any sacrifice, which my father could ask, that I should refuse.’

She spoke with some difficulty, as if she wished to escape the subject.

‘Perhaps that is a virtue that your sex helps to explain,’ said Wilfrid, musingly.

‘You do not know,’ he added, when a bee had hummed between them for half a minute, ’how constant my regret is that my mother did not live till I was old enough to make a friend of her.  You know that she was an Italian?  There was a sympathy taken out of my life.  I believe I have more of the Italian nature than the English, and I know my mother’s presence would be priceless to me now that I could talk with her.  What unsatisfactory creatures we are as children, so imperfect, so deficient!  It is worse with boys than with girls.  Compare, for instance, the twine with boys often.  What coarse, awkward, unruly lumps of boisterousness youngsters mostly are at that age!  I dislike boys, and more than ever when I remember myself at that stage.  What an insensible, ungrateful, brainless, and heartless brat I was!’