’I lingered at one of the gates through which we passed to enjoy the beauty undisturbed by the motion of my own body.

’"I have often wished,” Mr. D’Arcy said, “that I had a tithe of your passion for Nature, and all your knowledge of Nature.  To have been born in London and to have passed one’s youth there is a great loss.  Nature has to be learnt, as art has to be learnt, in earliest youth.”

’"What makes you know that my chief passion is love of Nature?” I asked.

’"It was,” he said, “the one thing you showed during your illness—­during your unconscious condition.”

’"And yet I remember nothing of that time,” I said.  “This gives me an opportunity of asking you something—­an opportunity which I had determined to make for myself before another day went by.”

’"And what is that?” he said, in a tone that betrayed some uneasiness.

’"You have told me how I came here.  I now want you to tell me, too, what was my condition when I came and what was my course of life during all this long period.  How did the time pass?  What did I do?  I remember nothing.”

’"I am glad you are asking me these questions,” he said, “for I believe that the more fully and more exactly I answer them, the better for you and the better for me.  Victor Hugo, in one of his romances, speaks of the pensive somnambulism of the animals.  ‘Somnambulism,’ sometimes pensive and sometimes playful, is the very phrase I should use in characterising your condition when you first came here and down to your recovery from that strange illness.  But this somnambulism would every now and then change and pass into a consciousness which I can only compare with that of a child.  But no child that I have ever seen was so bewitchingly child-like as you were.  It was this that made your presence such a priceless boon to me.”

’"Priceless boon, Mr. D’Arcy!” I said.  “How could such a being as you describe be a priceless boon to any one?”

’"I will tell you,” he replied.  “Even before that great sorrow which has made me the loneliest man upon the earth—­even in the days when my animal spirits were considered at times almost boisterous, I was always at intervals subject to periods of great depression, or rather, I should say, to periods of ennui.  I must either be painting or reading or writing.  I had not the precious faculty of being able on occasions to sit and let the rich waters of life flow over me.  I would yearn for amusement, and search in vain for some object to amuse me.  When you first came I was deeply interested in so extraordinary a case as yours; and after a while, when the acuteness of my curiosity and the poignancy of my sympathy for you had abated, you became to me a joy, as a child is a joy in the eyes of its parents.”

’"Then your interest in me,” I said, with a smile, “was that which you would feel towards a puppy or a kitten.”