Gentle hands were tending him and, as he turned his cheek on the pillow, it was with the comfort—almost that of the little boy at Channerley being tucked up in the warm nursery to go to sleep—of knowing that he was dying, and that, in spite of everything, he had given something to the name.
PANSIES
I
F course it is a horrid little garden, but one gets so fond of one’s own things, even when they are horrid,” said Miss Edith Glover, with her gentle deprecatory laugh.
She stood with her friend at the door of the conservatory that led from the sitting-room to the oblong plot of garden—a small, middle-aged woman, with soft brown eyes, and hair the colour of a faded leaf; her wasted throat and transparent temples and faint yet feverish flush marking her already with menacing symptoms.
The conservatory was of the sort that crops out irrelevantly at the back of the many suburban houses, like glaucous fungi; but in Miss Glover’s little establishment, its shelves filled with neatly ranged boxes of seedlings, with bundles of raffia, tidy baskets, and carefully garnered labels, it was completely utilitarian, with never a fern or begonia to recall its usual state. Miss Glover’s house was suburban, or nearly so, for though it stood in secure detachment from other villas on the southern slopes of a small Surrey town, the town, on its northern side, spread into ugly patches of red brick that devoured the woods and fields and ran long tentacles almost up to London. Acacia Road was removed from this peril of vitality, and its upper windows looked over pleasant stretches of untouched hill and meadow.