Edwitha often wished that the bowl could speak, and tell her how it was made, and who drew the little dancing figures. In course of time Wilfrid tried some experiments with pottery, ornamenting it with figures in white clay on the colored ground, and searching continually for new and better methods of glazing, baking, and modeling his wares. At last, when the years of his apprenticeship had all been served, and he knew everything that was taught in the old Sussex pottery by the ford, he came one spring twilight to the farmhouse and found Edwitha in the garden.
“It is no use,” he said, half-laughing. “I shall never be content to settle down here until I have seen what they are doing in other lands. If there is anywhere a man who can make things like that bowl of yours, I must learn what he can teach me. It may be that the secret has been lost—if it has, I will come back and work here again. A man was never meant to do less than his best, Edwitha.”
“I know,” said Edwitha. “Those figures make me feel so too. They always did. I don’t want to live anywhere but here—and now Audrey has gone away, uncle and aunt could never do without me—but I wish we could make beautiful things in England.”
“Some of the clever ones are in England,” Wilfrid answered. “They are doing good work in glass, I know, and in carven stone, and some other things, but that is mostly for the rich abbeys. I shall never be aught but a potter—but I will be as good a one as I can.”
Therefore Wilfrid took scrip and staff and went on pilgrimage to France, and there he saw things which made him sure that men had not lost the love of beauty out of the world. But he could hear of no master potters who made anything like the deep red Roman ware. After a year of wandering he came back, full of new plans, and with many tales to tell; but he told Edwitha that in all his travels he had seen nothing which was better worth looking at than her little Roman bowl.
