“May I come back in twenty minutes?”
“Oh, yes!”
“I like my own flowers to be just at their best when friends are to see them.”
“Yes, you understand.”
Canterton left her and spent half an hour walking the winding paths of the Japanese garden, crossing miniature waterways, and gazing into little pools. There were dwarf trees, dwarf hedges, and a little wooden temple half smothered with roses in which sat a solemn, black marble Buddha. This Buddha had caused a mystery and a scandal in the neighbourhood, for it had been whispered that Canterton was a Buddhist, and that he had been found on his knees in this little wooden temple. In the pools, crimson, white, and yellow lilies basked. The rocks were splashed with colour. Clumps of Japanese iris spread out their flat tops of purple and white and rose. Fish swam in the pools with a vague glimmer of silver and gold.
At the end of half an hour Canterton returned to the walled garden, and found Eve sitting before the picture, her hands lying in her lap. The poise of her head reminded him of “Beata Beatrix,” but her face had far more colour, more passionate aliveness, and there was the sex mystery upon her mouth and in the blackness of her hair.
“Ready?”
She turned to him and smiled.
“Yes, you may look.”
He stood gazing at her work in silence, yet with a profound delight welling up into his eyes. She watched his face, sensitively, hardly conscious of the fact that she wanted to please him more than anyone else in the world.