KITTY OF THE ROSES
[I]
Through the wide-open window floated in the fragrance of dew-dripping flowers. On the edge of the table a smouldering cigarette sent up a thin, wavering filament of gray smoke that lost itself in the upper gloom of the darkened room, leaving behind it a not-unpleasing odor of the Orient to mingle with the incense from the gardens without. When he paused in his writing—and pauses were frequent—Mr. Stephen Burton’s gaze invariably wandered to the sunlighted morning world represented by the vista at his elbow.
Immediately below him a small, turf-carpeted garden formed a square of shadow and sunlight. A jasmine clambered and sprawled along the purple brick wall at the rear, and a narrow, chocolate-hued bed of moist loam caught the fallen blooms. The bed held white and purple and lavender iris, and spiræa, and blue pentstemon, and was bordered with honey-flower. At the end of the old wall, where it formed an angle with an iron fence, a queerly shaped Daphne-tree threw grotesque shadows on the little lawn. But it was beyond the rusty iron barrier that Burton’s eyes found their richest reward.
There stretched a quadrangle that was bounded by walls on two sides and at the farther end by the back of an old-fashioned Southern house, staid and sleepy-looking, whose second-story porch, half hidden by vines over white-painted iron lattice-work, held a hammock which ever since Burton’s coming had remained idle, swinging lazily in the afternoon breezes. The quadrangle was intersected by narrow red gravel paths bordered by box hedges waist-high. And between the hedges, against the walls, along the fence, and clambering upon the house were roses. Never had Burton seen or dreamed of such roses. The garden was a riot of intense reds, of tender pinks, of flaring yellows and dazzling whites, and of every hue and tint between.