“Dear me. Isn’t it fascinating after that?”
“Oh, not all that awful walk along the Upper Richmond Road—not until our avenue begins—”
11
Miriam fumbled with the fastening of the low wide gate as her mother passed on up the drive. She waited until the footsteps were muffled by the fullness of the may trees linking their middle branches over the bend in the drive. Then she looked steadily down the sunflecked asphalted avenue along which they had just come. The level sunlight streamed along the empty roadway and the shadows of the lime trees lay across the path and up the oak palings. Her eyes travelled up and down the boles of the trees, stopping at each little stunted tuft of greenery. She could no longer hear her mother’s footsteps. There was a scented coolness in the shady watered garden. Leaning gently with her breast against the upper bars of the gate she broke away from the sense of her newly-made engagement.
She scanned the whole length of the shrouded avenue from end to end and at last looked freely up amongst the interwoven lime trees. Long she watched, her eyes roaming from the closely-growing leaves where the green was densest to the edges of the trees where the light shone through. “Gold and green,” she whispered, “green and gold, held up by firm brown stems bathed in gold.”
When she reached the open garden beyond the bend she ran once round the large centre bed where berberus and laurestinus bushes stood in a clump ringed by violas and blue lobelias and heavily scented masses of cherry-ripe. Taking the shallow steps in two silent strides she reached the shelter of the deep porch. The outer door and the door of the vestibule stood open. Gently closing the vestibule she ran across the paved hall and opened the door on the right.
Harriett, in a long fawn canvas dress with a deep silk sash, was standing in the middle of the drawing-room floor with a large pot of scented geraniums in her arms.
12
“Hullo!” said Miriam.
Putting down her pot Harriett fixed brown eyes upon her and began jumping lightly up and down where she stood. The small tips of her fawn glacé kid shoes shone together between the hem of her dress and the pale green of the carpet.