He surprised them at every turn.  His father’s canvases filled him with admiring awe.  “Oh, but I say—­however is it done?” As he stood before them with legs a trifle wide, he smoothed the top of his head with a gesture of perplexity.  And Mr. Frank, standing at his shoulder with legs similarly spread, used the same gesture—­as Miss Bracy had seen him use it a thousand times.  Yet the boy had no artistic talent—­not so much as a germ.  For beauty of line and beauty of colour he inherited an impeccable eye; indeed his young senses were alive to seize all innocent delight,—­his quickness in scenting the lemon-verbena bush proved but the first of many instances.  But he began and ended with enjoyment; of the artist’s impulse to reproduce and imitate beauty he felt nothing.  Mr. Frank recognised with a pang that he had failed not only in keeping his torch bright but in passing it on; that the true self which he had missed expressing must die with him barren and untransmitted.  The closer he drew in affection, the farther this son of his receded,—­ receded in the very act of acknowledging his sonship—­with a gesture, smilingly imprehensible; with eyes which allured the yearning he baffled, and tied it to the hopeless chase.

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.