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Mr. Frank, who worshipped flowers, was perhaps the most ineffective gardener in England. With a trowel and the best intentions he would do more damage in twenty minutes than Miss Bracy could repair in a week. She had made a paradise in spite of him, and he contented himself with assuring her that the next tenant would dig it up and find it paved with good intentions. The seeds he sowed–and he must have sown many pounds’ worth before she stopped the wild expense–never sprouted by any chance. “Dormant, my dear Laura–dormant!” he would exclaim in springtime, rubbing his head perplexedly as he studied the empty borders. “When I die, and am buried here, they will all sprout together, and you will have to take a hook and cut your way daily through the vegetation which hides my grave.” But Victor, who approached them in the frankest ignorance, seemed to divine the ways of flowers at once. In the autumn he struck cuttings of Miss Bracy’s rarest roses; he removed a sickly passion-flower from one corner of the cottage to another and restored it to health within a fortnight. Within a week after his coming he and Miss Bracy were deep in cross-fertilizing a borderful of carnations she had raised from seed. He carried the same natural deftness into a score of small household repairs. He devised new cradles for Miss Bracy’s cats, and those conservative animals at once accepted the improvement; he invented a cupboard for his father’s canvases; he laid an electric bell from the kitchen beneath the floor of the dining-room, so that Miss Bracy could ring for Deborah by a mere pressure of the foot; and the well-rope which Deborah had been used to wind up painfully was soon fitted with a wheel and balance-weight which saved four-fifths of the labour.

“It beats me where you learned how to do these things,” his father protested.

“But it doesn’t want learning; it’s all so simple–not like painting, you know.”

Mr. Frank had been corresponding with the boy’s headmaster. “Yes, he is a good fellow,” said one of the letters; “just a gentle clear-minded boy, with courage at call when he wants it, and one really remarkable talent. You may not have discovered it, but he is a mathematician; and as different from the ordinary book-made mathematician–from the dozens of boys I send up regularly to Cambridge–as cheese is from chalk. He has a sort of passion for pure reasoning–for its processes. Of course he does not know it; but from the first it has been a pleasure to me (an old pupil of Routh’s) to watch his work. ‘Style’ is not a word one associates as a rule with mathematics, but I can use no other to express the quality which your boy brings to that study. . . .”

“Good Lord!” groaned Mr. Frank, who had never been able to add up his washing bills.

He read the letter to Miss Bracy, and the pair began to watch Victor with a new wonder. They were confident that no Bracy had ever been a mathematician; for an uncle of theirs, now a rector in Shropshire and once of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where for reasons best known to himself he had sought honours in the Mathematical Tripos and narrowly missed the Wooden Spoon, had clearly no claim to the title. Whence in the world did the boy derive this gift? “His mother–” Miss Bracy began, and broke off as a puff of smoke shot out from the fireplace. It was late September; Deborah had lit the fire that morning for the first time since May, and the chimney never drew well at starting. Miss Bracy took the tongs in hand, but she was not thinking of the smoke; neither was Mr. Frank, while he watched her. They were both thinking of the dead woman. The thought of her–the ghost of her–was always rising now between them and her boy; she was the impalpable screen they tried daily and in vain to pierce; to her they had come to refer unconsciously all that was inexplicable in him. And so much was inexplicable! They loved him now; they stretched out their hands to him: behind her he smiled at them, but through or across her their hands could never reach.