I explained, and I read aloud the bit that had struck my fancy.
Arthur got restless half-way through, and took out the Book of Paradise. His letter was on his mind. But Adela was truly delighted.
"Oh, Mary," she said. "It is lovely. And it just suits you. It suits you much better than being a Queen."
"Much better," said I.
"You'll be exactly the reverse of me," said Harry. "When I'm digging up, you'll be putting in."
"Mary," said Arthur, from the corner where he was sitting with the Book of Paradise in his lap, "what have you put a mark in the place about honeysuckle for?"
"Oh, only because I was just reading there when James brought the letters."
"John Parkinson can't have been quite so nice a man as Alphonse Karr," said Adela; "not so unselfish. He took care of the Queen's Gardens, but he didn't think of making the lanes and hedges nice for poor wayfarers."
I was in the rocking-chair, and I rocked harder to shake up something that was coming into my head. Then I remembered.
"Yes, Adela, he did—a little. He wouldn't root up the honeysuckle out of the hedges (and I suppose he wouldn't let his root-gatherers grub it up, either); he didn't put it in the Queen's Gardens, but left it wild outside—"