"Not yet, please," said Mary. "Let us have it all to ourselves for a few minutes." And they seated themselves on the sunny porch, the old gentleman's delight now beginning to show itself in the nervous way he moved his hands, and his disjointed sentences. Mary took off her hat at once, and threw it, with rather more of gayety than was quite natural to her, upon one of the short branches, looking like pegs, which had been left in the pillars of the porch.
"You haven't forgotten the old ways—eh, Mary?" Dr. Heremore asked, as he saw the movement. "I remember well how proud you were the day you first found you could reach that very peg, and you are as much a child as you were that day, is she not, Charles?"
"Pretty nearly," answered Dick, who could not fulfil his part with Mary's readiness.
"How deliciously fresh everything looks!" exclaimed Mary.
"You should have seen it in June. I never saw the roses thicker. O pet, how I did wish for you, then! The time of roses was always your time."
"And I love them as much as ever!" exclaimed Mary, telling the truth of herself. "Next year, if I am alive, I will be here with them; we will have jolly times looking after them. I have learned a great deal about flowers lately, but I shall never love roses like yours." This indeed, Mary felt to be true.
"Flora has had to be replaced," said her grandfather observing her eyes resting on a statue in the garden in front. "I will show you the alterations I have made, and a few are improvements. But you must have something to eat now. I cannot let you go a minute longer. You came up by the boat, I presume?"
"Yes, and had a hearty dinner," Mary answered, having a dread of a servant's entering, and getting things all wrong again, "To eat now will only spoil our appetite for tea, and I want you to see what an appetite I have."
"Perhaps you are too tired to go around the garden?"
"Tired! No, indeed."