For a few moments there was quiet in the garden. A flock of pigeons hovered about Iris, taking grain from her outstretched hand, and cooing soft murmurs of content. The white dove was perched upon her shoulder, not at all disturbed by her various excursions to the source of supply. Lynn worked steadily, seemingly unconscious of the girl’s scrutiny.

Finally, she spoke. “I don’t want any of your old vegetables,” she said.

“How fortunate!”

“You may not have any at all—I don’t believe the seeds will come up.”

“Perhaps not—it’s quite in the nature of things.”

The pouter pigeon, brave in his iridescent waistcoat, perched upon her other shoulder, and Lynn straightened himself to look at her. From the first evening she had puzzled him.

Her face was nearly always pale, but to-day she had a pretty colour in her cheeks and her deep, violet eyes were aglow with innocent mischief. There was a dewy sweetness about her red lips, and Lynn noted that the sheen on [Pg 39]the pigeon’s breast was like the gleam from her blue-black hair, where the sun shone upon it. She had a great mass of it, which she wore coiled on top of her small, well-shaped head. It was perfectly smooth, its riotous waves kept well in check, except at the blue-veined temples, where little ringlets clustered, unrebuked.

[Pg 39]

“You should be practising,” said Iris, irrelevantly.

“So should you.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not going to play with you any more.”

“Why, Iris?”

“Oh,” she returned, with a little shrug of her shoulders, which frightened away both pigeons, “you didn’t like the way I played your last accompaniment, and so I’ve stopped for good.”

Lynn thought it only a repetition of what she had said when he criticised her, and passed it over in silence.

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