‘It’s no use going on thinking and talking about the F. of H.D.,’ said Caroline, when they had talked of nothing else for an hour and a half. ‘What we’ve got to do now, is to find the right flowers for the presentation.’
An hour’s earnest study of Miss Peckitt’s invaluable present yielded an interesting list. ‘Learning’ had apparently no floral emblem, so blue salvia, which means ‘Wisdom,’ was chosen to represent it. It was felt that on an occasion of this sort it was impossible to have too much of a good thing, so twelve flowers were chosen, and all but one, an outsider called circæa, which means a spell, of which the gardener had never heard, were found in the Wonderful Garden.
Rupert prevailed on Mrs. Wilmington to open the drawing-room on the ground that the clergyman was coming to tea, and she even agreed to allow the floral tributes to be arranged on a large table in that hallowed sanctuary, only insisting that a linen drugget should be laid down before so much as a blade of grass was carried in.
The drugget, white with many a washing, only seemed to add to the festival air which the drawing-room soon began to put on.
‘Talk of magic,’ said Charlotte; ‘what is it if it’s not that with Mrs. Wilmington? Rupert can drive her with a rein of darning cotton.’
Mrs. Wilmington had indeed consented to ‘do’ the vases on the mantelpiece and cabinets, ‘rather than have you children smashing everything to atoms,’ she said, and even, at Rupert’s request, had agreed to put only the flowers he handed to her. ‘Though a shabbier lot,’ she said, ‘it was never my lot to beheuld. More like a passel of weeds, I should say.’
The selected flowers were certainly none too showy. And the drawing-room decorations might perhaps have, in the end, looked what Mrs. Wilmington called ‘mingy,’ if Charlotte had not suddenly remembered that the rose, as the flower of secrecy, was entitled to be present, in, as she said, ‘the richest profusion.’
The large table was covered with loose pink rose leaves. That was Caroline’s idea. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know what it will remind them of. But reminding doesn’t matter when all’s forgotten and forgiven, and look how soft and fluffy they look, like pink fur.’
This also reminded one of things. But no one said anything, though every one tried so hard not to look at the leopard skin that they might just as well have been staring at it.
‘How pretty the flowers look, reflected in the looking-glasses,’ said Caroline tactfully; and Charlotte, with less tact but equal goodwill, moved an embroidered stool between Rupert and the leopard’s spotted hide.