“Everything is different!” he repeated, with confident emphasis. “Don't you see yourself it is?”
“You say it is,” she replied, hesitatingly, “but that alone doesn't make it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it.”
“Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that,” he broke in triumphantly. “We've been standing off with one another. We've been of no help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over everything together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do, and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it.”
She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. “Don't count on me for too much wisdom or invention,” she warned him. “If things are to be done, you are still the one who will have to do them. But undoubtedly you are at your best when you are doing things. This really has been no sort of life for you, here.”
He gathered her arm into his. “Come and show me your greenhouses,” he said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. “It'll turn out to have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here,” he continued, as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness of new intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his tone with buoyancy. “I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and getting myself into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In every way I'm a better man than I was.”
They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached now a long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft colour—whites, yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds—were dimly perceptible.
“The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year,” Edith observed, as they drew near to the door of this house. “Collins did them very badly—as he did most other things. But next year it will be very different. Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is he in there now, I think.”
Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions stirred by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.
“Gafferson?” he asked her, with a blank countenance.
“My new head-gardener,” she explained. “He was at Hadlow, and after poor old Lady Plowden died—why, surely you remember him there. You spoke about him—you'd known him somewhere—in the West Indies, wasn't it?”