“That is too long a story,” she said, rising to her feet. “You would not understand it, and if you did, it would bore you. But it is late now, and I must be going home.”
“You must promise to tell me another time,” said the grocer’s son. “If the weather keeps fine I shall be working here every afternoon, until about half-past three when the light changes. Come and have tea with me to-morrow and finish your story.”
Anne promised to come, and then gathering up her flowers and saying good-bye to Rachel, she hurried off, for young Sotheby had to go back to his easel and put it away in the dove house, and she had no wish to be seen walking home with him.
EIGHT: WILLOW-PATTERN PARIS
For several days a gentle wind blew from the west and the cloudiness of dew-drenched mornings was followed by the sunshine and softness of the afternoons. Anne Dunnock knew that the grocer’s son was painting at the Burnt Farm, but though each day she set out in that direction, she always turned aside on the way, breaking her promise that she would meet him there again.
“I spoke to him too freely; Heaven knows what he must think of me!” she repeated to herself. At moments she found it consoling to remember that she felt quite sure that she did not like Richard Sotheby, but at other times it seemed to her that what was so terrible was to have confided so much of her secret life to a man whom she disliked. But the weather was too beautiful for her to remain long unhappy for such reasons, and nearly her whole day was spent out of doors. In the morning she would busy herself in the garden, and, tempted by the sunshine, Mr. Dunnock would leave his study to come and stand beside her while she sowed the sweet peas and the mignonette, or planted out young wallflowers in the borders.
“Do not forget to sow teazles by the pond,” he would remind her. “They are as handsome as hollyhocks, and wherever there have been teazles in summer time the goldfinches will come in winter.”
Anne did not regard the teazle as a weed, she loved the plant’s bold leaves that hold hands about the prickly stem, making a cup to catch the rain, and the flower-heads with their bands of blue which creep up and down the inflorescence.
Few words passed between father and daughter, yet both were happy as they went together to sow the teazle seed that he had saved, and were conscious of being in sympathy with one another as they had scarcely been all the winter. Once there was a rose tree to be transplanted; on another occasion a rambler which had been blown down had to be nailed up on the far side of the summer-house, and while Anne shovelled the earth round the roots, and drove the nails through strips cut from an old stair carpet, Mr. Dunnock held the tree upright and the creeper in place, his hands protected in Noah’s hedging gloves.
“The bees are working in the willows,” he said. “Though it is still three weeks to Palm Sunday.”