"Rachel!" Miss Parrott's voice had a pleasant ring to it. Rachel came dancing along a little curving path, the red coral beads flying up and down on her breast, her cheeks nearly as red. "Oh, it's perfectly beautiful here," she cried.
"Do you like it?" Miss Parrott's thin cheek glowed, too. It carried her back to the day when she as a child had been skipping in that old garden, and her heart gave a throb at the thought that there were perhaps in store for her many delights yet, through Rachel's enjoyment of the old-fashioned flowers and shrubs.
"But come, child," she brought herself up suddenly to say, with a little laugh; "Hooper has summoned us to luncheon, and we must obey."
"Do you have to obey a servant?" asked Rachel, coming out of her dance to fall into step by her side, and looking up with wide-open eyes.
"Always," said Miss Parrott most positively, "else they won't obey me, if I don't. It's system that makes everything comfortable, Rachel."
As Rachel knew nothing whatever about system, she followed silently, her small head full of the beautiful garden in which she had been rioting, and which—oh, joy!—Miss Parrott promised she should visit again, when the luncheon was over. And seated at the polished mahogany table, she was so lost in thought that Miss Parrott, in state at the other end, was obliged to speak to her twice before she looked up.
"Finish your soup, child," said Miss Parrott.
Rachel hadn't even begun it, and she now seized the first thing upon which her hand rested, a heavy silver fork. Hooper, back of his mistress's chair, darted forward to put the right implement before her. But Rachel gave him a withering glance that stopped him half-way. "You don't need to come. I've got it"; and she held up her spoon triumphantly, and ever after, all through the meal, she seemed to view his necessary advances as so many affronts, intended to show up her lack of manners, and she exercised all her wits to keep him at bay. So that the old butler was glad when the meal was over.
But long before that time arrived, Rachel had leaned back in her tall, carved chair, letting her knife and fork rest on her plate, while she feasted her eyes over the table, what it held, and then around the whole apartment.
"There's some of the same flowers like the ones in the garden," she said, bringing her gaze back to point to the old-fashioned silver vase and its nodding clusters in the center of the table. "What are they?"