“Thank you, oh, so much. Tell them not to whisper a word of it.”
“There will be no difficulty, dear, about that.”
Betty, white and troubled, added a sharper flavor to the stew by withdrawing dramatically from the stage. And any one wise as to the contradictoriness of human nature could have prophesied how the news would spread had he seen the Lady Sophia voyaging on her diplomatic mission round the hall.
“Poor Mrs. Steel! Such an unfortunate coincidence! Not a woman easily upset, but, believe me, my dear Mrs. So-and-So, it was as much a shock to her as though she had heard bad news of her husband. Now, I am quite sure this unpleasant affair will go no further. Of course not. I rely absolutely on your discretion.”
And since the discretion of a provincial town is complex to a degree of an ever-repeated confession, coupled with a solemn warning against repetition, it was not improbable that this froth would haunt the pot for many a long day.
CHAPTER XXXIV
June is the month for the old world garden that holds mystery and fragrance within its red-brick walls. In Lombard Street you would suspect no wealth of flowers, and yet in the passing through of one of those solid, mellow, Georgian houses you might meet dreams from the bourn of a charmed sleep.
Aloofness is the note of such a garden. It is no piece of pompous mosaic-work spread before the front windows of a stock-broker’s villa, a conventional color scheme to impress the public. The true garden has no studied ostentation. It is a charm apart, a quiet corner of life smelling of lavender, built for old books, and memories that have the mystery of hills touched by the dawn. You will find the monk’s-hood growing in tall campaniles ringing a note of blue; columbines, fountains of gold and red; great tumbling rose-trees like the foam of the sea; stocks all a-bloom; pansies like antique enamel-work; clove-pinks breathing up incense to meet the wind-blown fragrance of elder-trees in flower. You may hear birds singing as though in the wild deeps of a haunted wood whose trees part the sunset into panels of living fire.
Mary of the plain face and the loyal heart had opened the green front door to a big man, whose broad shoulders seemed fit to bear the troubles of the whole town. He had asked for Catherine and her husband.
“They are in the garden, sir.”