“I have,” said Barbara staidly. She motioned to a carefully packed and tied parcel in a sack. “And there’s a whole basket of eggs from all our fowls.”
Edrupt laughed. He liked her business-like little way.
“Did you take any red-rose cuttings?” he inquired. “There’s a still-room where the old castle used to be, and they’d use some, I believe.”
“It’s the Provence rose,” Barbara said. “I took the whole bush up and set it in a wooden bucket. Michael won’t want that.”
Michael the poultryman was adding the little garden and the stall in the Poultry to his own business. He would cart away the little tumbledown cottage and plant kale there.
“The Provence rose, is it?” queried Edrupt thoughtfully. “We’ll have it beside our door, Barbara, and that will make you feel more at home.”
Both Barbara and the roses throve by transplanting. When Edrupt came home from his long foreign journey, more than a year later, it was rose-time, and Barbara, with a basket of roses on her arm, was marshaling a flock of most important mother-ducks with their ducklings into the poultry-yard. The house with its tiled and thatched roofs sat in the middle of its flocks and fruits and seemed to welcome all who came, and Dame Lysbeth, beaming from the window, looked so well content that it did him good to see her.