It was a simple, kindly-faced little woman who asked the question, looking up to her husband, the gardener.
Randolph and Pet had taken a long walk through the streets of the city of Victoria, and out among the scattered houses and fields that border the way. Presently they reached a pretty cottage almost hidden from sight by a mass of climbing honeysuckle. In the garden beside it grew a profusion of old-fashioned flowers—stocks, sweet mignonette, geraniums, and many others.
A bed of lovely pansies attracted Pet’s attention.
“Oh! do you suppose they would sell some?”
“We’ll soon see,” and sure enough, there was “Ma” upon the little piazza, beaming with hospitality and pleasure at the approach of visitors.
She set to work at once gathering pansies, and while she arranged her nosegay, the two Bostonians talked with her husband, who, it seemed, was an Englishman, and earned his living from his garden, which he was just watering. He took especial pride in his fuchsias, which grew in lovely abundance and variety all around his door. Sweet peas were there, too, the vines nearly as high as your head, all covered with dainty “painted ladies.”
“Pa” having furnished the string, Randolph received (for twenty cents) a great bunch of pansies. The little saleswoman then added a stalk of gillyflower and a scarlet geranium for buttonholes, and with a smiling face said good-by.
The pansies were soon transferred, Pet keeping the gillyflower in her dress until she was out of sight, “so as not to hurt Ma’s feelings,” and then replacing it by the pretty “thoughts.”
Later in the day they visited the Chinese quarter of the city, in company with Tom and his inseparable kodak.