“No,” laughed Agnes D’Arcy, “they—they’re smelly,”—and she pursed up her mouth, and ended in a little trill of deprecatory laughter, as she often did. Hilda looked from one to the other, blushing.
“Come, Lettie,” said Leslie good-naturedly, “I know you have a farmyard fondness—come on,” and they followed George down.
As they passed along the pond bank a swan and her tawny, fluffy brood sailed with them the length of the water, “tipping on their little toes, the darlings—pitter-patter through the water, tiny little things,” as Marie said.
We heard George below calling “Bully—Bully—Bully—Bully!”—and then, a moment or two after, in the bottom garden: “Come out, you little fool—are you coming out of it?” in manifestly angry tones.
“Has it run away?” laughed Hilda, delighted and we hastened out of the lower garden to see.
There in the green shade, between the tall gooseberry bushes, the heavy crimson peonies stood gorgeously along the path. The full red globes, poised and leaning voluptuously, sank their crimson weight on to the seeding grass of the path, borne down by secret rain, and by their own splendour. The path was poured over with red rich silk of strewn petals. The great flowers swung their crimson grandly about the walk, like crowds of cardinals in pomp among the green bushes. We burst into the new world of delight. As Lettie stooped, taking between both hands the gorgeous silken fulness of one blossom that was sunk to the earth. George came down the path, with the brown bull-calf straddling behind him, its neck stuck out, sucking zealously at his middle finger.
The unconscious attitudes of the girls, all bent enraptured over the peonies, touched him with sudden pain. As he came up, with the calf stalking grudgingly behind, he said:
“There’s a fine show of pyeenocks this year, isn’t there?”
“What do you call them?” cried Hilda, turning to him her sweet, charming face full of interest.
“Pyeenocks,” he replied.