“Yes, isn’t it strange.”
“Some day I want to do a book on trees.”
“Do you? What’s the name of that dear Japanese-looking infant there?”
“Retinospora Densa. You know, we nurserymen and some of the botanists quarrel about names.”
“What does it matter? I tried to study botany, but the jargon——”
“Yes, it is pretty hopeless. I played a joke once on some of our botanical friends; sent them a queer thing I had had sent from China, and labelled it Cantertoniana Gloria in Excelsis. They took it quite seriously.”
“The dears!”
Laughter passed between them, and an intimate flashing of the eyes that told how the joy of life welled up and met. They wandered on through acres of glowing maples, golden privets and elders, purple leaved plums, arbutus, rhododendrons, azaleas, and all manner of flowering shrubs. In one quiet corner an old gardener with a white beard was budding roses. Elsewhere men were hoeing the alleys between the straight rows of young forest trees, poplars, birches, elms, beeches, ilexes, mountain ashes, chestnuts, and limes. There were acres of fruit trees, acres of roses, acres of the commoner kind of evergreens, great waves of glooming green rolling with a glisten of sunlight over the long slopes of the earth. Eve grew more silent. She was all eyes—all wonder. It seemed futile to exclaim when there was so much beauty everywhere.
They came at last to a pleasaunce that was the glory of the hour, an herbaceous garden in full bloom, with brick-paved paths, box edging, and here and there an old tree stump or a rough arch smothered with clematis, or honeysuckle. Delphiniums in every shade of blue rose like the crowded and tapering flèches of a mediæval city. There were white lilies, gaudy gaillardias blazing like suns, campanulas, violas, foxgloves, snapdragons, mauve erigeron, monkshood, English iris, and scores of other plants. It was gorgeous, and yet full of subtle gradations of colour, like some splendid Persian carpet in which strange dyes merged and mingled. Bees hummed everywhere. Old red brick walls, half covered with various kinds of ivy, formed a mellow background. And away on the horizon floated the blue of the Surrey hills.
Eve stood motionless, lips slightly apart.