"Not that I don't care very much for the purple ones," said Aubrey; "they are most beautiful flowers, most beautiful; but it's wild in woods, that I like best to see them. It will be a business to replant; dear me! It took me a day of hard work to establish my white ones in that haphazard-looking little colony down there."

"Gardening is all hard work," said Mrs. Pomfrey, "and all disappointment, for the most part, too. It's only the things you didn't expect to succeed that ever do, and any effect you particularly count on is pretty sure to fail you." She tempered her grimness by a slight, bleak smile, however, for she and Aubrey Westmacott understood each other and had the gardener's soul, for which no work is too hard and no disappointments too many.

"It will be very wonderful to have the intervals of pink to look forward to, though," Aubrey found the atonement. "They are singularly lovely, aren't they? Will you think me very silly, now, I wonder, or sillier than you always think me?"

"I don't think you silly, my dear Aubrey," Mrs. Pomfrey interposed, "only guileless; you are very guileless; I've thought that ever since you were taken in by that dreadful cook of yours, who had red hair, and got drunk and rubbed the whitebait through a sieve."

"Well," Aubrey continued, smiling his gentle, tentative smile, "my foxgloves, at all events, can't take me in, and since they are so very unusual and so lovely I thought I'd ask a few people in to-day to see them. The Carews, you know, and Barton, and Mrs. and Miss Pickering. And you--if you can come. I'll put it off till to-morrow, if that will secure you, only the foxgloves may not be quite so lovely by then."

"I will come with pleasure, my dear Aubrey," said Mrs. Pomfrey, "and though n.o.body will appreciate your foxgloves as you do, we shall all enjoy your tea."

"Miss Pickering cares very much for flowers, you know, very much. We've talked a great deal about flowers," said Aubrey, swinging his eyegla.s.s and nodding as he looked at his old friend.

"Does she? She doesn't know much about 'em though."

"No; all those years in India, and in towns. She has lived so much in towns. Such an inappropriate life it seems for such an exquisite creature."

"Does it?" said Mrs. Pomfrey. She added after a moment, as if with concession, "She is a very pretty girl."

Aubrey Westmacott was not acute. "Isn't she?" he said eagerly. "A beautiful and n.o.ble and lovely head, isn't it? like a flower; she is altogether like a flower, with her slenderness and height. Do you know,"

he went on, swinging his gla.s.ses more quickly, while he kept his ingenuous eyes on his friend, "can you guess the flower she makes me think of? In that pale pink dress, that pink dress she wore the other day at the rectory garden party, and with that white hat lined with pink. Can you guess?" His eyes overflowed with their suggestion.

Mrs. Pomfrey moved hers from his face to the foxgloves. "Like those, I suppose you mean."

"_Isn't_ she?" he repeated. "Now, isn't it quite remarkable? You see it, too."

"Yes; I see it," said Mrs. Pomfrey. She studied the flowers and again, after a deliberating pause, went on, "Do you think Mrs. Pickering is like purple foxgloves?"

Aubrey's eyegla.s.s tumbled from his hand. He was astonished, almost indignant. "Mrs. Pickering?"

"She looks like her daughter," said Mrs. Pomfrey; "as much like her, that is, as a purple foxglove looks like a pink one."

"I can imagine nothing more unlike a flower than Mrs. Pickering," said Aubrey, with gathered repudiation.

"No; certainly; she's not at all like a flower. She's more like a sparrow--something sharp and commonplace and civic. I only intended an a.n.a.logy, for she must have been a very pretty girl."

"Nothing could be less sharp or commonplace or civic than Miss Pickering." Aubrey was now deeply flushed.

"Oh, of course not, my dear Aubrey; she is very unusual looking," Mrs.

Pomfrey again conceded. "And she is tall and her mother is short. Old Colonel Pickering, too, was tall, I remember. I saw him once or twice when they were living at Cheltenham the year before he died! a bleached, dull, oppressed old man, a much better type than the wife; she ruled him, I heard, with a rod of iron. One may be sure that she doesn't rule Miss Leila. She is a young lady with a will of her own, unless I am much mistaken in her."

"A will of her own; yes, yes"--Aubrey eagerly, pathetically to Mrs.

Pomfrey's ear, gathered up the ambiguous fragments--"and great firmness of will; great decision of character; and the serenity, you know, the sweet dignity that go with it, that so often go with it. You have noticed her serenity, her dignity. And she is very silent--a great contrast to her mother. I often wonder what brought them here. It's very fortunate for all of us; but Mrs. Pickering is, as you say, so civic, yes, so commonplace, that I don't understand what she can find in this quiet place to please her. She certainly doesn't care about her garden.

Those beds about The Cottage are very distressing; they distress Miss Pickering."

"It's quite clear to me why they came," said Mrs. Pomfrey. "They can't afford London, and, I suppose, know n.o.body there if they could; and there is more chance of a pretty girl like Miss Leila marrying well here than there is in Cheltenham. She doesn't hunt, it's true; but the hunting makes a difference, and there is a good deal going on in one way and another. Mrs. Pickering hoped to capture Arthur Barton; she made that very evident. But he has never looked at another woman since his wife died, and never will, I imagine; at all events, he didn't look at Miss Leila."

Aubrey's eyes, dwelling on her, expressed reprobation and almost horror.

"She tried to marry her daughter to Barton! That lovely child and Barton! What a terrible woman!"

"Miss Pickering must be a good twenty-five, my dear Aubrey, and I was married at eighteen. No; I don't like Mrs. Pickering, but I can see nothing reprehensible in her determination to settle her daughter well in life."

"But Barton! He is fifty! He must be fifty! He must be older than I am; yes, very considerably older than I am."

"Well?" said Mrs. Pomfrey, and there was a mingled reluctance and grimness in her smile, "and do you think of yourself as unmarriageable?"

He ran his hand several times over his head and through his hair. He was still flushed, but suddenly he became pale, swallowing quickly several times.

"Do you know--you have said something--you have made me think something--put something before me. Yes; I must tell you, I must tell you," he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and fixing his eyes on the wall above Mrs. Pomfrey's head. "I love her; I love Miss Pickering. You may think it absurd. I know I'm a dull old bachelor; everything of that sort; but there it is. Ever since I saw her, a year ago, when they first came. I never dreamed of anything else. A dull old bachelor, nothing to offer, and twice her age. But I can't help wondering--it's only a wonder--whether there might just be a chance for me--if you don't think my age, and all that, makes it impossible. What I mean," Aubrey finished, with a sort of quiet desperation, "is--could she love me? It would have to be love with a girl like Miss Pickering. Am I a man that a girl like that could love?"

Tears now were in his eyes as he brought them back to Mrs. Pomfrey's, and seated upon the sofa, the pink foxgloves in the Chinese bowl beside her, she looked back at him very gravely. She was so grave that for some moments she was silent. Then, before speaking, she took out her spectacles and polished them and put them on. She saw him quite well without them. It was as if in emphasis of the gravity of the moment.

And, in the first place, she did not answer his question.

"How much have you seen, my dear Aubrey, of this young lady?" she enquired.

He said, faltering, that he had seen a good deal of Miss Pickering during this spring and summer. Mrs. Pickering had been very kind, had asked him there quite often for tennis; and Miss Pickering had been far more kind, for she had played with him and he was a wretched player, though he was so fond of the game. "And we've had one or two little walks. She came with me to the woods this spring and helped me to dig anemone roots. Oh! I don't pretend it's anything at all; it's only, I know, her kindness; I never thought it anything else. But--if you really don't think me absurd for dreaming of it--?" He faltered to a long gazing question.

Mrs. Pomfrey now rose. She stood looking away from him, then moved towards the door. "My dear Aubrey," she said, "I think of you what anybody who knows you must think--that the woman who wins your love is one of the most fortunate of women. Whether you are the kind of man that a girl like Miss Pickering could love, I cannot say. I've really seen very little of her. All that I know of her is that she is very pretty and has nice quiet manners. If she marries you, she is, as I say, the most fortunate of women."

Mrs. Pomfrey stepped out into the little square, flagged hall. He accompanied her to the garden gate, following her speechless, while, lifting up her skirts, displaying large, flat-heeled shoes, she stepped down from terrace to terrace. She paused at the last.

"Your Alpine phlox is doing very nicely. You'll find that by next year it will have spread to a foot across," she said. He had put in the Alpine phlox the autumn before under her supervision. She added at the gate, "By that time there may be a Mrs. Westmacott at Meadows."

Pale, almost tearful, he pressed her hand over the gate. "I can't say how I thank you," he murmured.

After a little while he was able to compose his thoughts and write his notes. Thompson took them round, and before lunch he had his answers.

They could all come, except Mr. Barton, the dapper, fussy, kindly, pepper-and-salt little squire, who lived in the beautiful big house just over the nearest hill; he had gone up to London for the day.

Aubrey very much enjoyed giving little tea-parties at Meadows. In London he had not enjoyed them at all. He had given them when duty required it, and he had sometimes been very extravagant and had taken a couple of young girl cousins, up for the season, to a restaurant and a play. But he had never enjoyed these occasions. He was shy and a poor talker, and in London the demands upon one's personality were too heavy to make his entertaining a success. The demands upon one's personality in the country were so small and so easily satisfied; a garden talked for one and entertained for one. All his neighbours, except Mrs. Pickering, whose formal beds did not count, had gardens and were profoundly interested in them. The mild, middle-aged Carews were authorities, and to-day he remembered, with all the pressure of his new preoccupations, that he must question them about that matter of mulching.

At four-thirty he saw two parasols approaching along his box hedges--one was black and one was rose-colour; his heart stood still when he saw it.

She would be wearing, then, the dress that made her look more than ever like a pink foxglove. He went down the terraces to greet mother and daughter at the gate.

Mrs. Pickering was short and stout and blonde, her slightly rapacious features--small aquiline nose, small smiling mouth, and small projecting chin--embedded and m.u.f.fled, as it were, in powdery expanses of cheek and throat. She had an unsmiling, steel-blue eye, appraising, determined, deliberate, under its level bar of dark eyebrow. She did not please Aubrey. Her voice in especial, metallic yet glossy, as if with a careful veneer, disturbed him. A gossiping lady of the neighbourhood had informed him that Mrs. Pickering's origins were quite lacking in distinction and that in her handsome girlhood she had stalked the stupid Colonel--of a quite good family--and had brought him down, resistless, at the first shot. These stories, for which he had not liked his informant the more, seemed to hover in Mrs. Pickering's glance and smile, and her voice to preserve the flavour of many strategies and triumphs. But Aubrey did not look for long at Mrs. Pickering. She rustled in, dressed in her fashionable black and white, a long chain of steel and brilliants crossing her b.u.t.tressed bosom, a crest of plumes, black and white, waving upon her head.

Miss Pickering followed her mother. Tall, very tall, and poised with a lovely grace, she was, but for the arresting darkness of brows and lashes, fair; with the infantile fairness, the wild-rose tints, that to the ingenuous male will always seem to vouch for a spiritual exquisiteness to match. And she, too, had small, aquiline features, and her hair was as golden as the heart of a wild rose. She did not smile, like her mother; she was a serene young lady, and silent, as loveliness should be.

"This sweet place!" said Mrs. Pickering. "How charmingly you are improving it, Mr. Westmacott; it looks prettier every time I see it."

"It will take years before it looks as I mean it to look," said Aubrey, leading them up the terraces. "That's the joy of gardening, isn't it? It gives one something to plan for one's whole future." He smiled with a slight appealingness at Miss Pickering. "I am afraid I make myself rather foolish sometimes; I talk so much about my garden."

"I don't wonder that you do," said Mrs. Pickering; "it's quite a little Paradise."

In the drawing-room it was Mrs. Pickering who continued to talk. She renewed her laments over the water-colours. "To think that these beautiful old places should get into the hands of common middle-cla.s.s people!"--Aubrey had again to a.s.sure her that the people who had bought his mother's old home were very nice indeed.--And Mrs. Pickering said that she doted upon his room, "So old-world, so peaceful!" and expatiated on the view of the terraced lawns and further meadows from the window. She made no comment on his foxgloves, and it seemed like a presage of happiness when Miss Pickering, from her chair, remarked, looking up at them, "How lovely your pink foxgloves are!"

"You think so? You like them? Yes, yes, are they not lovely?" He was delighted with her commendation.

"It's such a pretty idea, putting them with the gra.s.ses," said Miss Pickering. "I do like lots of flowers in a room."