By this time the child was perfectly at home with Holdsworth, and enjoying herself immensely, varying a bite at a slice of cake with a bite at some bread covered with jam, sipping the good milk Holdsworth had obtained for her with great gravity, and staring at the dolls, and then bending to make sure that her bricks had not taken to their heels while she was looking at the horse and cart, and that the horse had not bolted with the cart while she was looking at her bricks.
Holdsworth scarcely removed his eyes from her face. When he spoke to her there was a softness in his voice that melted like music on the ear.
At last she pushed her plate away, and Holdsworth rang the bell, and giving Mrs. Parrot private instructions to make up a parcel of the remainder of the cakes, etc., ready for Nelly to take home with her, he clasped the child’s hand and went with her into the garden, she holding the new doll, he dragging the horse and cart after him.
There was a square of grass in this garden, and a bench on it; and here Holdsworth sat, while Nelly played with her toys.
It was a roomy, old-fashioned garden, with aged walls, full of rusty nails and rotten ligatures, and a few tall pear-trees sheltering a small circumference of ground at their feet; and many fruit-trees sprawling wildly against the walls. The moss was like a carpet on the flint walk, and the box at the side of the bed was high and thick; and at the top of the garden was an old hencoop, hedged about with wirework, behind which some dozen hens scratched the soil for worms, and made the air drowsy with their odd, half-suppressed mutterings.
Moods possess us, sometimes, which such a scene as this will affect more pleasurably than a garden bursting with exotics, and tended with the highest artistic judgment. There is something very calming in homely shrubs, and old fruit-trees with their roots hidden by the long, vivid grass, and uncouth weeds thrusting their rude shapes among violet beds; and the solemn chatter of barn-door hens sunning themselves in hot spaces, or lying like dead things with a wing half-buried in sand and dirt, will sometimes impart a more agreeable tranquillity to the mind than the choicest songs of nightingales warbled in groves under a full moon.
Holdsworth suffered the child to have her full sportive will for some time, and then, thinking her tired, called her to him.
She ran to him at once, and he perched her on his knee.
“Is Nelly afraid of me now?”