HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

Other Books for Girls by
MARION AMES TAGGART

Issued by Doubleday, Page & Company

• THE LITTLE GREY HOUSE
• THE DAUGHTERS OF THE LITTLE GREY HOUSE

Issued by Other Publishers

• THE WYNDHAM GIRLS
• MISS LOCHINVAR
• MISS LOCHINVAR’S RETURN
• NUT-BROWN JOAN
• DADDY’S DAUGHTERS
• PUSSY CAT TOWN
• THE NANCY BOOKS (Five volumes)
• SIX GIRL SERIES (Seven volumes)
• LOYAL BLUE AND ROYAL SCARLET
• HER DAUGHTER JEAN
• BETH’S WONDER WINTER
• BETH’S OLD HOME

“‘NOT SUCH TALL, TALL GIRLS MY DAUGHTERS!’”

HOLLYHOCK HOUSE
A Story for Girls

BY
MARION AMES TAGGART

ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANCES ROGERS

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1916

Copyright, 1916, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian

Dedicated
with love to
Florence Ames

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

CHAPTER ONE
“THE ROSEBUD GARDEN OF GIRLS”

Mary, Jane, and Florimel—these were the three Garden girls. Mary, Jane said, “looked it.” She was seventeen, broad and low of brow, with brown hair softly shading it, brown eyes, as warm and trusty as a dog’s, looking straight out upon a friendly world from under straight brows and long brown lashes; a mouth that might have been too large if it had not been so sweet that there could not be too much of its full rosy flexibility. She had white, strong teeth and a clean-cut, reliable sort of nose, a boyish squareness of chin, and clear wholesome tints of white, underlaid with red, in her skin. She was somewhat above medium height and moved with a fine healthy rhythm, like one thinking of her destination and not of how she looked getting to it. Last of all, she had wonderfully beautiful hands, not small, but perfectly modelled, capable, kind, healing hands which, young as they were, had the motherly look that cannot be described, yet is easily recognizable, the kind of hand that looks as if it were made expressly to support and pat baby shoulders.

Jane was quite right: Mary Garden did “look like a Mary.”

Jane herself, at fifteen, did not in the least suggest her name. She was small, slender, if one were polite, “thin” if not. She had red hair of the most glorious, burnished, brilliant red, masses of it, and it was not coarse, like much of the red hair, but fine and uncontrollable. It glowed and rose and flew above and around Jane’s startlingly white face till it might have been the fire around the head of an awakened Brünhilde. No one could have said positively what colour her eyes were. They possessed life rather than tint. They flashed and dreamed, laughed and gloomed under their arching brows of red gold, through their red-gold lashes, with much of the colour of her hair in them. Her face was long, with a pointed chin and a delicate little nose; its thin nostrils quick to quiver with her quickened breath. Her upper lip was so short that her small, even teeth always showed; her mouth was sensitive, not to say melancholy. Her neck was long and slender and swan-white. Her shoulders sloped; she was not more than five feet tall; her hands were long and thin, quick and fluttering, like her lips. Altogether Jane was exactly the opposite of her prim, old-time name.

These two Garden girls had received Garden names from their father and his family. He had been Doctor Elias Garden, doctor of letters and physics, not of medicine; a grave man, devoted to study, old of his age, and that age twelve years more than his wife’s, to whom he had left his three little girls, when Mary was four years old, by dying untimely.

The third child this girl-wife had named. The mother was but twenty-four, and she was understood to have been fond of sentiment and the ornamental; she named her baby Florimel, out of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” This proved to be a misfit name even more than Jane’s. Florimel was a dark little witch, black-haired, black-eyed, white of skin, with red cheeks and red lips, a tomboy when she was small, an absolute genius at mischief as she grew older, devoid of the least love of the sentimental. She whistled like the blackbird Mary called her, climbed trees, fell out of them, tore dresses, bruised flesh, got into scrapes, but also out of them, through her impetuosity. She was a firebrand in temper, yet easily moved to pity, exceedingly loyal and loving to those she loved, seeing no virtues in those she disliked. Thus she had stormed her way up to her thirteen years, a problem to manage, except that she adored Mary so much that she could not long grieve her, and was so true and affectionate that she was sure to come out right in the end.

Young as they were, the Garden girls were three distinct types, each beautiful. Mary least could claim actual beauty, perhaps, yet she was the loveliest of the three. Jane and Florimel were creatures for an artist to rave over; Mary was the type that men and women and angels love. When Florimel was a year old their mother had left them. She was English, an artist of some sort, they knew, and she had elected to respond to the call of her art, and had gone to England, leaving her children to the more than efficient guardianship of the Garden relatives, their legally appointed guardian, Mr. Austin Moulton, their father’s friend, and the devotion of Anne Kennington, the housekeeper, nurse—everything. It would have been hard to define Anne Kennington’s position in the Garden household, as it would have been hard to do justice to the way she filled it.

The girls had never thought much about their mother. The Gardens had been too well-bred to decry her to her children, but they had gathered the impression that she “did not amount to much,” a fearful indictment from a Garden! Mary had silently felt, in a hurt way, that she could never have left three little girls, no matter to whom, and she had not talked about their mother, even to her sisters. As time went on, without being told so, the Garden girls came to imagine that their mother was dead. This impression of one whom only Mary remembered vaguely could not sadden them. They were motherless; but, though they envied girls with loving fathers and mothers, they had a great deal. Each in her way, the three Garden girls were philosophers and did not imagine they were unhappy when they were not, since no life holds every form of good.

They had the solid, fine old house; Win Garden, Winchester, their father’s half-brother, only twenty-four years old, so big-brotherly that it was silly to call him uncle, and they never did; and the Garden. The square house of pressed brick stood in a garden, a great, old-fashioned garden, blooming around it, as the house bloomed amid it, with its rosebud girls. Sometimes the Garden girls thought the garden was their chief earthly good; certainly it was their chief joy. With it and one another little else was needed for companionship.

Now, in May, the lilacs blossomed and the irises were beginning, the herald shrubs were announcing themselves vanguards of the flower-beds. Many of these were filled with perennials, growing taller, more luxuriant each year, thanks to the care they got, chief of them all the tall hollyhocks which illumined the garden on all sides. The hollyhocks were so many and so magnificent that they gave their name to the Garden house. It was known as Hollyhock House to all the countryside. Other beds were left for seeds of swift-growing annuals; each Garden girl had two of these beds for her own planting and, when they flowered, one could have accurately named their owners. Even meteoric Florimel did not neglect her flowers.

Jane was singing in the sunshine as she cut sprays of white lilac. She looked like a sunray clad in flesh, with the sunshine on her magnificent hair, and her slender body pulsating with song, as a ray of light quivers in the air.

Mary looked up from her aster seedlings which she was thinning.

“You look as though you were going to fly away, Janie Goldilocks!” she cried, dropping back on her heels to regard Jane. Mary was always discovering her sister anew.

“Wish I could!” cried Jane. “Fly right up like a spark—my hair is red enough! And be a spark that wouldn’t cool in the air, but keep on and on! Over the Himalayas!” she added as an afterthought; that sounded magnificently distant, big and vague.

“Over the home layers would do for me—the chicken house!” laughed Mary.

“My voice goes up and up; it’s part of me, yet, when it is up, it is no longer a part of me,” said Jane. “I’m here, my feet on the ground, and I can send my voice skyward, and it is mine, me, and not me. It goes very, very high——”

“I noticed it,” said Mary. Indeed Janie’s singing had mounted to the treetops, an arrow of sound, sharp, clear, yet never shrill.

“You old nuisance!” cried Jane. “Why don’t you ever want to fly? And why do you sing in that purring alto, just like yourself? I want to jump over the moon and sing to C above high C! It’s just because you’ve brown hair!”

“I don’t know,” suggested Mary. “It was the cow who jumped over the moon, and cows are supposed to be calm folk. Maybe she was a red cow though; Mother Goose forgot her complexion.”

“She ought to have been an Ayreshire cow, going up in the air like that.” Janie rippled with laughter over this discovery. “Never mind, Molly Bawn; I’d soon fly back again, if I flew away from you, and I don’t believe if I flew to the hanging gardens of Babylon I’d be happy to hang in them, away from the Garden garden, long!”

“Of course you wouldn’t!” agreed Mary promptly. “We both know there’s no place like home, but I settle down knowing it, and you keep fermenting like yeast! That’s what I don’t understand.”

“Wine sounds nicer than yeast and ferments just as much,” Jane reproached her. “Yeast is gray and ugly and smelly; grape juice fermenting is lovely. I can’t help being fizzy! Fuzzy, too, and red-haired! But I’d never fly far from you, Mary blessing.” And Jane ran over to hug Mary till she toppled her over. They both laughed, and returned to their flowers, one cutting, the other transplanting. Jane resumed her singing, her voice soaring high in “I love the name of Mary,” transposed to an unreasonable key.

“I ought to have been the soprano Garden, with my name,” said Mary. “I’ve the prima donna name and the secunda donna voice—no, the tertia donna voice—such as it is! The alto isn’t even the second lady of the opera, is she?”

“I don’t know! What in all this world is all this learned Latiny sounding count you’re trying! We’ve always called you our Opera Star, Mary Garden, haven’t we? I know what the prima donna is, but I don’t know what your secunda and tertia—oh, I see! Prima is first—yes, I see! You’re not much like an opera Mary Garden, I suppose, but you can sing! I love your voice—just like a lovely cat that’s had plenty of cream, purring all contented on a cushion! Soft and true and sweet; that’s your voice, little Mary Garden—even if you’re not big Mary Garden!”

“Well, Jane!” cried Mary, when Jane paused. “A cat purring, after cream! But it isn’t as though I thought anything about singing. What are we trying to get at? I never even think of singing. I see Win coming out of the house, and I hear Florimel talking like mad. I wonder what it is, now!”

“Goodness knows!” sighed Jane, as if anything might be expected of their youngest—as indeed it might!

Winchester Garden, the young half-uncle who seemed like a whole brother to the young girls, came down the central path of the garden to join Mary and Jane. He was good to look at, lean, but not thin, muscular, with a swinging easy walk; he had a smooth-shaven, humorous face, with keen, yet kindly eyes which twinkled in a way that matched a certain laughing twist of his lips. He was tall and his colouring was harmonious, hair, eyes, and skin all of a brownish tint.

“Hallo, little nieces! Hallo, little nices!” he called, correcting himself.

“Hallo, Win, the winner!” Jane shouted back. “Methinks I hear Florimel—lifluous,” said Win.

Mary laughed; Jane did not know what the word meant.

“Nothing particularly mellifluous about Florimel’s voice just now,” she said.

Somewhere beyond the fence arose Florimel’s voice. “Come along!” it was saying sharply. “Do you think I can drag you! Big as you are? Even if I knew you wouldn’t bite! Come on!” This more encouragingly. “If you only won’t be shy,” they heard her add in a tone of exasperated patience, “I’m sure my sisters will be glad to see you, and some one will help you out, probably our guardian, Mr. Austin Moulton. He can do ’most anything of that sort.”

“Well, what on earth do you suppose the kid has in tow, now, that requires such an assorted exhortation?” murmured Win.

Florimel appeared at the wicket gate which admitted to the garden from the street at the rear of the Garden place. But above her, over the hedge, arose another head, some ten inches higher than Florimel’s dark one, the fair head of a boy about eighteen. His face was pale, his expression troubled, his eyes seemed to ask for pardon for his intrusion, but he was there. It was only when he followed Florimel through the gate, at her vehement invitation, that one saw that he limped.

Florimel was rosy from earnest and strenuous effort; her brilliant face was fairly scintillating with excitement, her dark eyes snapping. The reason for what Win had called her “assorted exhortation” was revealed by the presence of the lame boy and of a dog which she was gingerly, yet forcibly, conducting by any part available for seizure, there being no collar by which to lead her. It was a dog of varied ancestry, setter and hound predominating. On a groundwork of white a large liver-coloured spot, like a stray buckwheat cake, was displayed on one side, and a large liver-coloured spot, with a smaller one just below it, giving the effect of the print of the sole and heel of a muddy and large shoe, decorated the dog’s other side. The liver and white tail which she cheerfully waved was too broad and thick successfully to carry out its design; so was the body too unevenly developed for beauty. But the head was really beautiful, with long liver-coloured ears, soft and fine, carrying out the liver-coloured sides of the face, divided by a broad white parting from crown to tip of nose. The brown eyes looking out from this fine head were the softest, loveliest of dogs’ eyes—and there can be nothing more said in praise of eyes than this.

“It’s homeless!” Florimel announced breathlessly. “It hasn’t any home. It’s been hanging around the hotel and they won’t feed it for fear it will keep on hanging around. Amy Everett and I found them driving it off—with brooms!” Florimel’s voice conveyed that this weapon was of all the most unpardonable. “I grabbed its hair—they said ’twould bite, but it never would! And I pulled its ears—they’re as soft! And it licked my nose before I could jump. So I’m going to keep her—please! We need a dog, really. It is a peach; only a puppy, about six months old; they said so at the hotel. People had it and dropped it—didn’t want it. Isn’t it perfectly fiendish the way they do that to cats and dogs? So I want her. Don’t shake your head, Winchester Garden; I—want—this—dog!”

Mary, Jane, and Win had been following this eloquence with various degrees of embarrassment, for while Florimel introduced the dog she made no allusion to the boy, whom some people, less animal lovers than Florimel, might have thought should have been first introduced. He stood patiently awaiting his turn while Florimel talked. But, after all, this was less a misfortune than it seemed, for it was absurd enough to make him laugh, and this put him slightly more at ease, besides recalling Florimel to her duty.

“My sakes, I forgot!” she cried, but not in the least contrite. “I met this—this—— Are you a gentleman or a boy?” she demanded.

This sent all four of her hearers into a burst of laughter, and laughter is a good master of ceremonies, abolishing ceremonial.

“I hope to be a gentleman soon; in the meantime I’d like to be considered a gentlemanly boy,” said the stranger. His voice and manner of speaking warranted his hope. “I am eighteen. I guess I’m still a boy. My name is Mark Walpole. I came to this town because I heard that there was a chance here for employment, but the place I was after is filled. I’ve had rather a setback starting out in life. My mother has been dead some years. There was a fire. It destroyed our house, and my father was—he died in it. It seems he left nothing behind him; we had been considered rather well-to-do. I’m afraid his step-brother got the best of him. He showed he hated me, and that may have been because he had wronged us. People thought so. He held the land where the house had been, and there wasn’t any money. I had to start out; of course I wanted to. I couldn’t have breathed in that town—this all happened in Massachusetts. So I’m seeking my fortune. This little girl seems to be in the rescue line to-day. She heard me ask for work; she was struggling along with this dog. So she annexed me, too! She seemed to think she knew some one who was sighing for a chance to start me. I didn’t want to come here with her, but we couldn’t seem to help it—neither the dog nor I!” The young fellow stopped and smiled at Florimel, with a glance at the others.

“Yes, that’s Florimel!” cried Mary, with conviction. “She sweeps all before her.”

“She’s a six-cylinder, seventy-five horsepower,” added Win. “But she’s all right—except when she’s all wrong! This time she’s dead right. We’re glad you came. Come into the house; there’s supper soon, eh, Mary?”

“Indeed there is, a good one!” cried Mary, jumping to her feet. “Of course Florimel was right, and we are glad you came! Please don’t seem to be going to refuse to stay, because you must stay, anyway! We love to have company!”

“We get dreadfully tired of just ourselves,” added Jane, though this was an exaggeration of her own occasional moods. “We’re awfully glad you came. This is Hollyhock House, we are the Garden girls—Mary, Florimel, Jane.” She touched her own breast with her thumb bent backward.

“Winchester Garden,” added Win, with a bow. “I’m Jane’s uncle, but not worth her introducing. It’s pretty tough to have such disrespectful nieces! I’m their father’s half-brother. I’m afraid they are all trying to be sisters to me, not nieces. I know they are trying, if that’s all! Awful trials! Come up with me to my room and let’s wash up for supper. You said your name was Mark; sure it isn’t Maud? Wish it were!”

“Why?” asked the guest, evidently both alarmed and pleased by this cordiality.

“We never catch a Maud. We want to say: ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’—either this nice old garden, or the Garden house—but no one turns up to fit! Come into the house, anyway. Mark is within three letters—two—of being Maud.”

And Win laid his hand on the lame lad’s shoulder, with great kindness underneath his nonsense, and bore him away in triumph. As he went the girls heard him saying: “We fit our Tennyson in one way: we’ve a rosebud garden of girls, three of ’em.”

“Take the dog around to Abbie, and ask her to feed her and make a place in the woodhouse for her to sleep. She must stay to-night, anyway,” said Mary. “Then hurry to get yourself ready for supper, Florimel; you’re covered with white hair and dogginess!”

“Good thing to be covered with,” said Florimel. “What’ll we call the dog, Janie?”

“I was thinking; Chum is a nice name for a dog,” said Jane.

“It’s a fine name!” cried Mary.

And Florimel saw that her dog was safe. “But I knew you’d love her, you darling things!” she cried, as she tore off, with her large and cheerful outcast rushing after her.

CHAPTER TWO
“WHO LOVES A GARDEN LOVES A GREENHOUSE, TOO”

“We call our house a greenhouse, though it is made of red brick, because it grew all the Gardens,” explained Mary, when Win brought their unexpected guest down to supper.

The boy was less pale for a vigorous towelling, but he looked uncomfortable, like one who could neither account for his being there nor feel that he ought to be there. Mary saw at a glance that Win had adopted him without reservation during their absence. Win was a most definite person toward his acquaintances; one was never in doubt as to his attitude toward them. He loved, or he loved them not, and one never had to have recourse to a daisy to find out which it was. He kept his hand on the lame lad’s shoulder, as he entered the dining-room, and smiled at him with peculiar kindness.

“Yes, we consider that a subtle bit of cleverness!” Win supplemented Mary. “The house is a greenhouse for growing the Garden roses—see?” He waved his hand toward Mary and Jane. “It has grown other Garden plants, for that matter. My grandfather, the girls’ great-grandfather, built it, and it was owned by my father, and then by my elder brother, their father. I was born in it; so were they. It went to two oldest sons; then that last one had nothing but three worthless girls to leave it to!” Win scowled fearfully at them.

“It’s a dandy house,” said the stranger, looking around him.

It really was! The hall ran through the middle of it, with big rooms on either hand and windows catching the sun’s rays in turn, as the solid house was swung around him. The dining-room got the last of the daylight, facing westward as it did. A glowing sunset lighted up the round mahogany table, in the centre of the room, and its snowy damask, brilliant glass, and silver. Fine old steel engravings of Landseer’s pictures hung around the wall; the chairs were solid, high of back. The room gave an effect of cheer, and space, and plenty.

“I feel horribly uncomfortable, intruding,” said the guest, looking with convincing appeal and a flushed face at the girls.

“I don’t think you could call it intruding to stay when you are urged to—and wanted—do you?” asked Mary.

“My only fear is there mayn’t be enough to eat!” said Win.

“There is, then!” declared a new voice, and they all turned to see Abbie Abbott, bringing in a tray with creamed chicken garnished with parsley, and a steaming plate piled with flaky biscuits. Abbie might have been almost any age between twenty-five and sixty-five; in reality she was halfway between those two ages, and a character.

“You’ve enough to feed six delegates to a convention—and they’re the hungriest things I ever come across, Mr. Win! Mr. Moulton and Mis’ Moulton called on the phome and said they’d be over to-night,” added Abbie.

“We always say Mr. and Mrs. Moulton called,” remarked Jane, as Abbie disappeared. “You don’t speak of every one together as you do them. I wonder why!”

“And you don’t hear people calling over the ‘phome’ unless you happen to be Abbie Abbott,” added Win. “Sounds like a sea song.

“I heard a voice across the foam:

To-night I’ll tread the Garden loam;

Helm hard a-lee, I’m sailing home!”

“Win, you ridiculous fellow!” cried Mary, with her merry laugh.

Jane ran to him and shook him approvingly; Jane could never approve heartily without violence. “You lovely idiot!” she cried.

Florimel dashed into the room and collided with Abbie bringing Saratoga chips and tomatoes. “Oh, gracious!” cried Florimel, dropping into a chair.

“You may well say so!” said Abbie sternly, as she skilfully saved her burden from wreck. “Good thing it wasn’t next trip, with the coffee-pot steaming hot and the diddly cream jug!”

“Now we are all here; we don’t have to wait any longer,” announced Mary, with evident relief. “Grubbing in the garden makes me hungry.”

“Let me wait on Mr. Walpole, because I found him; Chum was starving,” said Florimel, and they all laughed.

“So am I,” said the guest, accepting the skipping Saratoga potatoes which Florimel aimed at his plate, or as many of them as arrived there. “But my name is Mark.”

“Nice, handy one, too; can’t be shortened,” said Win. “We’ll all be first-name friends from now on. I’m the oldest of the lot and I’m only six years older than Mark. What’s your specialty, Mark? Any special work you’re after?”

“Paying work,” said Mark, with a laugh. “I did intend to study a good while longer. I’m not prepared for any special work; not ready for it, I’m afraid, but it has to be found, if it’s wrapping grocery parcels. I’d like to work with a botanist; I know more about botany than anything else.”

“And Mr. Moulton is botany crazy, in an amateurish way!” cried Mary.

“I wonder how a person is an amateur lunatic,” murmured Jane.

“Now, who’d expect you, of all people, to ask that, Jane?” said Win suggestively. “Mr. Moulton is at work on a tremendous book, more tremendous than it will ever be book, I’m afraid. He’ll never finish it! ‘A Study of the Flora of New York,’ he calls it, and he’s making a herbarium as big as the book. Maybe he’d take you to help on it.”

“If I could do it,” said Mark doubtfully.

“If nobody can possibly eat another bite, nor drink another drop, suppose we go out and watch the stars come out, and wait for Mr. and Mrs. Moulton to come over,” suggested Mary.

“If it was anybody else, or we were anybody else,” said Florimel, “and Mr. and Mrs. Moulton was their guardian—Mr. Moulton, really, but Mrs. Moulton does more guarding than he does—we’d call them Uncle Austin and Aunt Althea, but we never do. Mr. and Mrs. to them means just as much as uncle and aunt do when other girls say it to people who aren’t any relation. Mr. and Mrs. Moulton like us to call them what they really are; not relations, when they’re not.”

Mark laughed, and Win said: “Strain that, kiddums, to clear your remarks. They’re badly mixed.”

Mary explained to Mark: “Florimel means that we never fell into the way of calling people who weren’t related to us uncle and aunt, but Mr. Moulton and Mrs. Moulton are two of our cornerstones. I do wish Mr. Moulton would let you help him. Very likely his book will never be published, but I’m sure it’s fine, and as interesting as it can be to work on. Mr. Moulton would be so happy if a young person were working with him. All we can do is listen when he tells us about it, or reads us bits, but he knows quite well that we don’t understand any more about the scientific part of it than a telephone receiver would, and that must be discouraging.”

“I don’t know what your Mr. Moulton would want of me, but I’d be glad enough if he could use me. You see I meant to go on studying, go to college and specialize and maybe teach, and do something worth doing in botany. But that’s knocked on the head.” Mark tried to speak carelessly, but the tang of disappointment was in his voice.

“No telling which is the short cut to your destination when you’re young and all roads stretch out before you, my son,” said Win, answering this note in the younger lad’s voice and laying a hand on his shoulder with a mock paternal air. “Come on outside, and take a course in botany and astronomy, sitting in our garden watching the stars come out.”

“Just a moment, Win,” murmured Mary. She laid a detaining hand on Win’s arm, and Mark followed Jane and Florimel through the door that led directly into the garden from the dining-room.

“Aren’t we to keep him overnight?” Mary asked. “It may be he hasn’t much money for lodgings, and morning seems the right time to set out.”

“Why, of course, Lady Bountiful,” Win concurred heartily. “Sure thing we’re going to keep him to-night! He’s a mighty nice little chap, if he is out seeking his fortune, and Florimel did pick him up—like the dog!”

“He’s very nice,” Mary agreed. “He has lived among nice people. But he isn’t a little chap, Win; he’s taller than you are.”

“What are inches?” demanded Win. “When you are twenty-four, my child, you will understand that eighteen is mere infancy.”

“In fancy! Yes, it is!” cried Mary saucily. “In reality twenty-four is nothingness.”

“Disrespectful to your uncle! Bringing his dark hairs in sorrow to the gray!” growled Win, stalking after the others to the garden.

Mary ran out to look for Anne, whom she knew she should find at that hour helping Abbie get the supper dishes out of the way.

“Anne, Anne dear, Anne Kennington!” she called as she came.

“Mary, lass, what is it?” Anne answered, coming to meet her.

She was a tall Englishwoman of about thirty-five, with the brightness of her youthful brilliant colouring beginning to fade. The red in her cheeks was hardening as the whiteness around it browned, but her eyes still flashed fires out of their depth of blue, and her hair was almost black. She moved with a free, indifferent swing as if she had been born under the Declaration of Independence instead of the English queen. But her devotion to the Garden girls partook of the loyalty of a subject, while it was, at the same time, all maternal.

“We have a guest for the night, a nice boy a year older than I am, who came to Vineclad looking for work. Florimel met him and brought him home with her to see Mr. Moulton. Is the little room in order?” asked Mary.

“Little room, and big room, and middle-sized room, all the guest-rooms are in order,” said Anne, resenting the question. “But staying the night here, Mary? A tramp!”

“Mercy, no! A gentleman and very really!” Mary set her right. “His home was burned, his father was killed in the fire, and, instead of being left well-off, he had nothing. He is from Massachusetts, he didn’t say where; his name is Mark Walpole. Win thinks he is fine—it isn’t merely girls’ judgment.”

“And Winchester Garden is only a big boy; what does he know of reading character? Though he would be a good judge of breeding,” Anne conceded. “I suppose a night of him won’t ruin the place, though what with Florimel bringing home that dog and now a boy, there’s no telling what the end will be! Of course I knew he was at supper; he looks a nice sort; I’ll grant him that. Go on, Mary; Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are this minute crossing over. I’ll see that the ewer is filled in the boy’s room, and more than that it doesn’t need done to it; that, and a pair of towels.”

“There’s no housekeeper like our Anne! You can’t catch her napping,” laughed Mary, hastening out to help receive her guardian and his wife.

The Garden girls and their absurdly un-uncle-fied young uncle had a habit of sitting out in their garden in the evening from such an early date in the spring that everybody croaked “malaria,” till so late a date in the autumn that, figuratively speaking, the neighbourhood clothed them in shrouds and got out its own funeral garments.

But Vineclad, sitting some fifteen miles back from the Hudson River, never administered malaria to its trusting children, and the old Garden garden could never have been persuaded to harm its three girls, between whom and it was a love profoundly sympathetic.

Mary found Jane, Florimel, Win, and Mark, with Chum nearby, in the comfortable wicker chairs which stood about on the grass with which the garden emphasized its paths, permitting it to grow as a small lawn on the west side of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Moulton were just coming toward them through the broad path which led directly from the side gate.

Mr. Moulton was not above medium height. His hair was grizzled, as was his short-cropped moustache; he stooped and peered at the world through large-lensed glasses, as if he regarded everything, collectively and separately, as specimens. Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, carried herself so erect that she might have been protesting that the specimens were not worth while. No one had ever seen her dishevelled, nor dressed with less than elegant appropriateness to the time and occasion. The result was that she conveyed an effect of elderliness though she was not quite fifty years old, which is young in this period of the world’s progress. Her light-brown hair showed no thread of gray, her aristocratic face was still but lightly lined, and her complexion was fair, yet one thought of her as of a person growing old, though doing so with great nicety.

The three Garden girls sprang up to meet these arrivals with the alacrity and deference which was the combination of manner that Mrs. Moulton liked. Florimel damaged the effect this time by overturning her chair and stepping on Chum’s tail. Both chair and dog bounded as this happened and Chum howled, too newly adopted to be sure the injury was not intended.

“A dog, my dear?” asked Mrs. Moulton of Jane, at that moment kissing her cheek. But she looked beyond Chum at Mark, as being, in every sense, the larger object.

“Yes, Mrs. Moulton,” said Jane, curbing her desire to laugh. “Florimel found it lost, and brought it home. We have adopted it as a friend; it seems to be obedient and good tempered.” She flashed a look at Mark, calling upon him to appreciate this doubly accurate description. Her hair, rumpled by the breeze, seemed to flash with her eyes; it looked like a part of the afterglow in the west now illumining the garden.

“Dog!” said Mr. Moulton, who had not discovered Chum. “Looks like a boy to me, a boy I don’t know.” He peered at Mark through his large glasses.

Win presented Mark, instinctively feeling that it would incline Mr. and Mrs. Moulton more favourably toward Mark if Win, and not the young girls, assumed the responsibility for him.

“Walpole, did you say?” Mrs. Moulton repeated after Win. “Mark Walpole? What was your father’s name? I knew of Walpoles in Massachusetts—what was your town?”

“Worcester, and my father’s name was Cathay. My grandfather was in India, and was pretty tired of it. He named my father Cathay because he felt as though he had been there a hundred years, had ‘a cycle of Cathay,’ you know. Hard on my father to get such a name, wasn’t it?” replied Mark.

“That’s the Walpole I meant!” Mrs. Moulton triumphed. “The very one! I didn’t know him, but a friend of my girlhood did; one couldn’t forget that name. Suppose you sit here and talk to me.” She led the way to a bench and motioned Mark to a place beside her.

“And suppose you sit here and talk to me!” echoed her husband, drawing a chair close to the one he took and inviting Mary to it. Mr. Moulton availed himself of most opportunities to appropriate Mary, his favourite of the three girls whom his friend had left to his guardianship, dear as they all were to him.

But the conversation did not divide itself off into duets. Mr. Moulton ceased to draw from Mary her story of the doings of the Garden household since his last report, and Jane and Florimel, neither of whom was often silent, joined in listening to Mrs. Moulton’s catechism of Mark and his answers.

“It isn’t as if I were all right, you know,” Mark said quietly, when he had told her of his aim to make his way in the world, though his hope of preparing to follow the course he would have chosen had been wiped out. “I’m lame. It doesn’t bother me much, but it will probably get in the way of lots of things a sound boy might do. I got my foot smashed when I was a little chap and it couldn’t be mended to be as good as new. But I’m sure I’ll limp into something—something that will keep me out of the bread line!”

“Mark was telling me, Mr. Moulton,” interposed Win, seeing his chance, “that he had gone quite far in botany, already he was planning to specialize in it, when he was thrown out of his own place in the world. I thought that would interest you.”

“Why not?” said Mr. Moulton, turning from Mary to scrutinize Mark anew, scowling at him nearsightedly. “As to being thrown out of your place in the world, my lad, there’s no power on earth can play you that trick; it’s every man’s work to make the place he’s in his own place. It’s a consoling truth—and most absolutely a truth—that a man often grows bigger himself for having to fit himself to a smaller place than he had expected to fill. As to this ambition of yours interesting me, touch a man on his hobby and there is not much question of interesting him! I’m a botanist by choice and profession, though luckily for me I could afford to be! I live in spite of it, not by means of it. I’m working on a vast herbarium and a big book: ‘A Study of the Flora of New York.’ Now if you knew enough to help me—I’m not sure it would be just to your future, but—I could use a clever youngster who had what I’d call botanical common sense as well as sympathy. Come and see me to-morrow morning! I can measure you if I have you in my study, but not here. From the beginning a garden, a garden with even one girl in it, proved fatal to planning for a happy future!” Mr. Moulton twinkled behind his owl-like lenses. His wife arose to go.

“When Mr. Moulton becomes facetious I say good-night,” she remarked. “I have a few chapters of my library book to finish before I sleep. We came only to be assured the Garden children still blossomed. Fancy finding Cathay Walpole’s boy here!” She arose with a rustling, impressive dignity, and her husband meekly arose also.

“Another reminiscence of that first garden—I do what the woman bids me,” he said.

The three girls kissed both their guardian and his wife, and offered their own cool cheeks to receive their good-night kiss. Then they escorted them to the gate, while Win strolled beyond it with them, accompanying them home. Jane and Florimel joined hands and danced like nymphs up the walk. It was always a strain upon them to keep up to Mrs. Moulton’s standards of propriety during one of their visits. Mary ran after the two, having lingered a little to say a last word to their old friends. Jane switched her skirts, held out in both hands, as she danced alone around the lawn. Florimel took Chum’s forepaws and tried to get her to dance, but the big puppy growled a protest and Florimel gave it up.

“Chum knows the hesitation, all right,” observed Mark.

Florimel caught Mary as she came and swayed her in a mad dance of her own devising.

“Mrs. Moulton knew your father! Mr. Moulton is going to love you for old botany’s sake. I’ve been lucky fishing to-day!” Florimel chanted. “And to-morrow you’ll go to see Mr. Moulton, and I’m going to give Chum a bath.”

Mark laughed, and looked admiringly at her brilliant beauty.

“What is it about helping lame dogs over stiles? That’s been your job to-day, Miss Gypsy Florimel!”

“We always have nice times,” said Mary, as if good luck for Mark and rescue of Chum had been her personal gain. “Come into the house.”

“Such a kindly, motherly house; I love it,” said Mark.

“It’s the greenhouse, you know, for us Garden slips, so it has to be warm and sort of hospitable,” Jane reminded him.

They all passed in through the wide door, into the broad hall, and the light from the bend of the wide staircase fell on four happy young faces, and, Mark rightly thought, on three of the prettiest girls he had ever seen together.

“It’s a lucky greenhouse with its specimens,” he said shyly, but with a smile at Mary.

CHAPTER THREE
“A ROSEBUD SET WITH LITTLE WILFUL THORNS”

Jane was almost always the first of the Garden girls to come down in the morning. She was as full of moods, varying in light and shade, as the surface of a pool overhung with branches. Throughout some of her days she chattered and sang in the wildest of high spirits from dawn till dark. Again she fell into deep wells of silence where nothing could reach her; remote and inaccessible she wrapped herself in her own thoughts, refusing to amuse or to be amused on these days. Whatever her mood, after the spring had come she was faithful to her flower-bed in the garden. Mary worked in hers more steadily, Florimel with greater gusto—when she worked—but Jane gave her bed the place of a beloved volume of poetry, in which she read daily. When the birds and the eastern sky were timing up together, in sound and colour, Jane sped lightly down the stairs and outdoors to look for overnight developments in her flowers and to sing above them.

“You sing to your posies for all the world the way the birds sing to waken the spring flowers!” Mary once said to her.

“If I’m a bird I’m a red-headed woodpecker, Molly darling, and he doesn’t sing,” retorted Jane, rumpling her brilliant locks.

The morning after Mark’s arrival Jane’s custom held good. Before any one else was downstairs she opened the door and went out into the fragrance and music of the late May morning, into the lovely old garden. Had there been any one there to see, they would have noticed that Jane wore her new brown street gown, not one of the simple chambrays in which she ordinarily said good-morning to her seedlings, who waited in bed for her coming—in fact, stayed in bed all day.

In a few moments there was some one to note this variation. Florimel followed Jane into the garden shortly, and instantly was upon her with an accusation.

“You’re dressed up, Jane Garden; where’re you going?” she cried.

“Florimel, don’t speak so loud,” Jane frowned at her. “I don’t want Mary to know, not till I get back; of course I’ll tell her afterward. I won’t tell you where I’m going; then you can truthfully say you don’t know where I am when they ask.”

“They won’t get a chance to ask; I’m going with you,” announced Florimel.

“Indeed you’re not! You can’t! I wouldn’t mind, I’d like to have you, but you simply can’t,” declared Jane. “Don’t be a nuisance and a baby, Mel; I can’t let you go, or I would,” she added out of her experiences in Florimel’s possibilities.

“I simply will go, unless you tell me where it is you’re going, and I see for myself I can’t go or I don’t want to,” declared Florimel. “Of course that’s plain silly, Jane. I can go wherever you go. If you tell me where it is and I do happen to stay at home I won’t tell Mary or any one. But if you don’t tell me I’ll tell what you just said and get them all stirred up—Mary, Win, Anne, everybody. And you know what I say I’ll do, I’ll do.”

Jane knew precisely this truth. “I can’t take you, Florimel, because you’re too young,” she said unwisely.

“Two years and three months younger than you are!” interposed Florimel scornfully. “What’s that!”

“A lot when I’m only fifteen,” said Jane. “I’m going before breakfast; I’ve had all I want out of the pantry. Well, then, Mel, I’ll tell you, but it’s on your word of honour not to say anything till I do—you promised!”

“Don’t I know I promised?” retorted Florimel. “And don’t you know wild horses and hot pokers couldn’t get me to tell, if I said I wouldn’t? Then hurry up!”

“I’ve always thought I had talent to act,” Jane announced. She continued, disregarding Florimel’s hastily stifled laughter: “I thought, maybe, I ought to go on the stage—of course not yet, but after I was, say three years older, and had studied for it. There’s a company in town now—acted in the Crystal Theatre last night. They are going away this morning on the 10.10. The leading lady’s name is Alyssa Aldine—I think Aldine always sounds like nice people; I suppose because the Aldine editions of books are so famous. Then I read such nice-sounding things about her in the Vineclad Post that I knew she wasn’t one of the ordinary actresses; she must be beautiful and clever. And it came to me like a flash that I would slip off early this morning, and get to the hotel before they leave, and ask to see Miss Aldine and get her to tell me frankly whether she thinks I ought to go on the stage. A girl ought to try to find out just as early as she can what is her work in the world. I suppose I could recite and sing to Miss Aldine, if I had to, though I’d dread it. You see there aren’t many chances to get good advice about the stage, here; it isn’t often that talented, refined ladies come to Vineclad to act, they say.”

Florimel had heard this speech of Jane’s with utter amazement and disgust on her handsome face, which, childish though it was, was quite capable of expressing disgust with its black eyes and curling red lips.

“Well, Jane! Well, Jane Garden!” Florimel cried scornfully the instant Jane paused. “Talk about my being younger than you are! Why, you’re a baby! Haven’t you heard Win talk about the companies that come to the Crystal? One-night-stand companies, he says, that travel about in the country towns, are never any good! We never go. The idea of your going to call on this actress and asking her—well——” Florimel broke off, unable to express herself more satisfyingly.

“I told you, Florimel, that I read about Miss Aldine in the Post and she is not one of that ordinary kind,” said Jane severely. “I am going. It can’t do any harm, and it may do good. Don’t you tell Mary till I get back; don’t tell her at all; I will. But you can’t go with me.”

“I can and I will,” said Florimel in the tone which her family had learned to recognize as final. “I’m going to see you don’t get kidnapped by these queer people. Take Anne, if you’re bound to go! But you won’t! So I’m going. I know you, Jane Garden. When you got there you’d double up, you’d be so scared. That’s you all over, getting up some perfectly crazy idea like this and then all but dying doing it, when there never was the least bit of sense in doing it, anyway! I’ll get a sandwich and my hat. Crazy Jane, that’s what you are!”

Florimel walked off rigid with determination, excitement, and disapproval, leaving Jane with a sense of their youngest’s competence, and relief that, after all, she was not going upon her adventure alone. Florimel returned with her sandwich and her hat disposed each in its proper place and manner. The sandwich had become plural; luckily the hat had not. “I put a scrawl on Mary’s napkin telling her we had gone downtown on a secret errand, but would be back by ten,” said Florimel. “Good thing I didn’t run into Anne; she’d have been hard to quiet down. You’ve got on your street suit, and I haven’t, but I guess this is good enough.”

“You look very nice in that green and white chambray, Mel,” said Jane meekly. And the sisters sallied forth by the side gate of the garden into the quiet, shaded street.

It was a long walk to the heart of the small town where stood the Waldorf, Vineclad’s shabby and unique hotel, near the Crystal Theatre, which escaped by not much more than its name being merely a small town hall. Hollyhock House stood well beyond the collected business of Vineclad, out beyond the smaller homes of the place, built where acres for its setting and for its garden had been obtainable.

Jane and Florimel timed their progress to get to the hotel before eight, but they fell below their estimate of time required and got to the hotel somewhat before half-past seven.

“Good morning, young ladies,” said the clerk, as the girls halted before his desk. “You are familiar to me, yet I cannot place you. What can I do for you? Are you denizens of our lovely town?”

“Yes,” said Jane, without further enlightening him. “I want to see Miss Aldine, Miss Alyssa Aldine. She doesn’t know me, but please ask if I may see her—on business, important business.”

The clerk leaned over his desk as if to take the young girls into his confidence and Jane and Florimel fell back a few steps.

“Why, bless your lovely face and heart,” he said, “what time do you think the perfesh, which stop here, rises?—especially the lady perfeshes? Just in time to take the train! Just—barely—in—time—to—take—the—train, hustling!” He, too, fell back at this and regarded the girls triumphantly. “Breakfast in bed—also in curl papers—and a hustle to make the train. That’s the racket. Grand show last night; was you to it? Pity! Grand show. Now, I’ll tell you what to do. You go sit down comfortable in two of the Waldorf’s rockers, in the parlour, and wait calm and easy. And I’ll get a message up to Miss Aldine just’s soon as I think she will stand for it, and see if she won’t meet you. Peachy lady, she is, but I’ll tell her there’s two little girls here worth her looking at. Is that a go? Best I can do.”

“Thank you,” said Jane faintly, already dismayed by the unaccustomed atmosphere which she was breathing. “Yes, thank you; we’ll wait.”

“‘WHAT TIME DO YOU THINK THE PERFESH, WHICH STOP HERE, RISES?’”

“It’s all right; it’s very early, earlier than we thought we’d get here. Don’t hurry,” Florimel supplemented Jane with decision. “For goodness’ sake, Jane, now you are here, don’t fade right out! Didn’t I say you’d be like that?” she added in a severe whisper as Jane and she followed their guide to the overwhelming red plush of the Waldorf parlour.

The time of waiting seemed desperately long to both girls. The grandfather clock ticking in the corner—it had been manufactured to sell with a large order of cigars in the most recent of periods—seemed to accomplish less by its seconds than any other clock Jane and Florimel had ever met. At last an hour passed, and twenty minutes followed it. Then the clerk returned with a smiling face and the important manner of a triumphant ambassador.

“You’re to come right up to her room,” he whispered, not because there was any one else there to hear, but because his words were too precious to be scattered broadcast. “I done my best for you, and she’ll see you.”

Jane and Florimel arose at once. Jane was so pale that the clerk noticed it. “Don’t be scared,” he advised her kindly. “She’s easy to get acquainted with.” He took the girls up one flight of stairs and along a dusty corridor, carpeted in red and smelling of ancient histories.

“Here’s the room!” announced the clerk, swinging around a right angle turn in the corridor and pausing before a door at the end of the wing thus reached. “Number 22!” he added, as if announcing the capital prize in a lottery. He knocked for the girls, seeing them overwhelmed, and withdrew with a wink that might have meant anything.

“Stay out!” cried a feminine voice.

Rightly construing this as humour, Jane timidly opened the door. She saw before her a blowsy looking woman, in a pink kimono, its thin quality and flowing amplitude, as well as its heavy, once-white lace trimming, adding to the extreme rotundity of its wearer. Her hair was in curl papers, her feet in soiled pink “mules.” Beyond her sat a small woman, thin and tired looking, but animated, and still another with an indefinite face. Three men also adorned the room, all smoking; one of them was helping the indefinite woman to cram garments, that had not been folded, into a suitcase.

“Well, you pretty pair!” exclaimed the wearer of the pink kimono. “Say, Petey, what d’you know about this? Some lookers to drop in at this hour in a deserted village, what?”

“Right-o! Nice little pair, eh, Nettie?” the man addressed threw the question back at the pink kimono; plainly this was their preferred way of conversing.

“May we—— Is Miss Aldine—— May we see Miss Aldine?” stammered Jane.

An exceedingly pudgy hand, decorated with several rings of great distinctness but little distinction, and souvenirs of buttered toast, dramatically struck the pink kimono where it was pinned together with a rhinestone bar.

“I am Miss Aldine—on the stage—Alyssa Aldine, leading lady of the comp’ny. In private I’m Mrs. Pete Mivle—he’s Sydney Fleming on the stage, plays leadin’ man to my heroines.” Mrs. Mivle beamed proudly on her Pete, who assumed a look reminiscent of his more picturesque rôles and twirled his moustache with a hand upon which a diamond of at least three karats gleamed, genuine but yellowish.

“Got that off a chap that went stoney broke, at a bargain,” he exclaimed, seeing Jane’s eyes fastened upon it with what he took for awe.

“Say, what d’you want?” continued Miss Aldine, actually Mrs. Mivle, kindly, but in a businesslike tone. “Not that we ain’t pleased to death to see you, but you must of had an objec’ in comin’—or was it for my autograph? Pete writes ’em.”

“Oh, no!” cried Jane, dismayed to hear sounds in Florimel’s throat that meant she was suffocating with laughter. “I came—I thought——” She stopped.

“Say it!” advised the small, thin woman who looked past forty, and who played the young girl parts in the company’s repertory because of her diminutive size. “We’ve breakfasted; we won’t eat you! Get it out of your system.”

“I meant to ask your advice about studying for the stage,” Jane said, by a supreme effort. “But there’s no use troubling you; ever so much obliged.”

“Cold feet so soon?” suggested Peter Mivle kindly. “Lots of kids get stage struck! If you wanted to follow the legitimate, we could use you. Of course you’re too young, but there are ways of dodging the law. You’d make a great team, red and black, blond and brunette. Sisters?”

“Oh, no; I meant to study to be an actress when I’m older, if it was surely my proper talent,” said Jane. “Never mind; thank you ever so much.”

Mrs. Mivle laughed. “Lady Macbeth and all that kind, eh?” she suggested. “We play old comedy and society plays, like ‘East Lynne,’ ‘Ten Nights in a Bar Room,’ and so on. Shakespeare’s no good; we’ve got some funny ones, too. Take it from me, kid, it’s hard work keepin’ on the go every day, sleepin’ in damp sheets and beds that are about as soft as coal beds half the time. One-night-stand companies don’t find many snaps layin’ along the tracks. And there ain’t much in it. But we have good times enough together; no jealousy nor meanness in our gang. You drop the stage notion and trim hats! Easier, and you can stick to one boardin’-house and make good money. Ain’t you two got a home, pretty girls like you? You’d think anybody’d have adopted ’em,” she added, turning again to Peter.

“Oh, yes,” cried Jane, “we have a lovely—a home. We—I mean I only wanted your advice——” She stopped again.

Florimel could not resist her temptation. “My sister thought perhaps she had so much talent for acting that it was her duty to go on the stage. She read about Miss Aldine in the Vineclad Post and came to ask her advice, whether she thought she ought to study for the stage. That’s all.”

Florimel’s eyes danced and Mrs. Mivle and the elderly actress of youthful parts twinkled back at her.

“The little one has the drop on you, my dear,” Mrs. Mivle said joyously to Jane. “She’s got practical sense. I guess you’re up in the clouds; red-haired girls often are. But you’ve got hair that ’twould be worth being up into anything—or up against anything to have! If you’ve got a good home, what you botherin’ about? Stick to it; that’s what I say. I’m an artist all right, all right; you read what your paper says about me. But no art in mine, if I had the means to settle right down and bake pies like mother used to make. Must you go? Well, good-bye and good luck. So long! Hope to meet you again. Come see us act if ever we take in this town on this circuit again. We’re the real thing, if I do say it!” The others of the company bade Jane and Florimel good-bye, shaking hands with them with the utmost cordiality, and Peter Mivle, or “Sydney Fleming,” escorted them to the stairs.

Jane heard the laugh that arose behind them in the room they had left, but she also heard “Miss Aldine” say heartily: “Perfect beauts, that’s what!” And the voice of the little woman came out to them, saying pensively: “Oh, Nettie Mivle, ain’t it fine to be young like that, and not acting it!”

Jane and Florimel walked swiftly out of the little hotel with the great name, escaping from the clerk’s evident desire to learn the result of their call and its object, and from the idle lads who were gathering around the desk to see the actors, whose “show” they had seen the night before, come out and to compare actual appearances with those behind the footlights. The walk home was a silent one for Jane, but at intervals Florimel burst into laughter that was irresistible to passers-by and irrepressible to Florimel. Mary was busy when they came in, arranging the flowers which the garden yielded; not many yet in variety, but generous in quantity, even in May.

“Where can you two have been?” cried Mary, looking up with her sweet face smiling at them in a way that seemed to match the flowers beneath her cool finger-tips. “And so early? What are you up to, Garden girls? Have you had any breakfast, you rogues?”

“Oh, Mary, wait till you hear!” cried Florimel, throwing her hat in one direction and herself in another, on a chair. “We’ve been to see Miss Aldine; Jane wanted to be examined, but she changed her mind. Petey Mivle—that’s Sydney Fleming—said she——”

“Florimel, what can you be talking about?” cried Mary. “Who are all these people? Examined by whom, and for what?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you, Mary,” Jane took up the theme impatiently. “Florimel is so silly! Of course it was funny, only how was I to know Miss Aldine was Mrs. Mivle and that what the Post said wasn’t so?” Jane laughed at herself, her sense of humour too strong to allow her to feel annoyed with Florimel long.

“Positively I believe you’ve both gone crazy together, over night!” cried Mary. “Miss Aldine is Mrs. Mivle, you say? And Florimel is talking of ‘Petey Mivle’—like a schoolmate—and the Post—— Hurry the story!”

“Sit down, Mary, and I’ll harrow your young blood!” declared Jane, and forthwith gave her sister an account of her resolution to seek a great actress to ask advice on her career, and of the visit to the Waldorf. Jane told her story so well that Mary and Florimel and Anne, who had come in to find out what her younger charges had been doing, were all three in convulsions. It might have warranted any one in thinking that Jane was right in considering the stage her vocation.

“Oh, me, oh, me!” sighed Mary, emerging from the sofa pillows into which she had helplessly fallen. “You do such mad things, Janie! And you are so wilful! You ought not to have started off alone on such an errand, to people you knew absolutely nothing about! Florimel is a headstrong child, but even she is more prudent. They must be kind people, if they are untidy, and flashy, and trashy! I’m glad they were so nice to you. Please, Jane, settle down and stop being restless-minded!”

“Can’t do it,” said Jane promptly. “I suppose there’s fire inside my head and the roots of my hair are in it. That’s why I’m always crackling off in explosions, and why my hair is red.”

“And I suppose we want you to be just what you are, if we tell the truth,” added Mary as she went out of the room. She could not bear to seem to criticise Jane or Florimel, being sensitively alive to a dread of hurting them, and conscious of the slight difference in their ages.

Florimel ran after Mary, and Anne Kennington turned to Jane.

“What put the stage into your head, Jane?” she asked. “Were you thinking of your mother? You don’t look like her, but you are more like her, in some ways, than either of the others.”

“My mother?” echoed Jane. “Mercy, no, Anne! Why should I?”

“Well, of course she did not go on the stage, yet singing is, in a way, like it,” said Anne. “You know your mother was a singer and she couldn’t keep away from the old life: singing, and applause, and all that, after she was a widow. You know she left you here to go back to it.”

“Yes, I knew all that,” said Jane slowly, “but I seem to have to try to know it; it isn’t real to me. I never can make my mother real to me, Anne. You knew her. I wish you could make me feel what she was like.”

“Knew her? I came over with her before she married and I stayed with her till she went back to England. She left me; never I her,” said Anne warmly. “Just a slender bit of a thing was she, like a primrose, one that you couldn’t help spoiling, such coaxing ways she had and such a pretty face, with a little droop of her shoulders and a fall in her voice as if she begged a body to be good to her. I’d have cut off my head for her willingly. So I stayed, and did my best for her babies, without her.”

“And what a best!” cried Jane, with a flashing look of grateful love. “Oh, I wish I had seen her! You make her a darling, Anne; just a sort of toy mother, to be petted and to be proud of! Why did she die, Anne? Do you know? No one ever told us; not even Mary knows about her death.”

“I never heard one word about her dying, Jane; never the time, nor place, nor any syllable,” said Anne truthfully. “I mustn’t stand clacketing here any longer, Jane; I’ve more to do than I’ve minutes, though the good Lord gives to each of us all the time there is, if only we think about it.”

Anne hastened away, and Jane walked over to the window, absently watching Mark Walpole returning from his call on Mr. Moulton, though without consciously seeing him, nor remembering that she had been deeply interested in the result of this visit.

“What a pretty little toy mother! How I wish I had her, or had even seen her!” thought Jane, swinging the shade pull. “And now Mary can’t remember her more than as a shadow before a mirror! Oh, little coaxing mother, I wonder why you left your three girl babies? Perhaps because you were only a girl yourself. But we lost something we can never get back.”

CHAPTER FOUR
“HOME AT EVENING’S CLOSE, TO SWEET REPAST AND CALM REPOSE”

Mark Walpole came up the walk at a rapid gait, swinging one arm and breathing through his puckered lips as though he were whistling, though the tune of it was in his mind only; no sound came forth. Mary met him at the door with her pretty air of self-forgetfulness and absorption in others, the manner that was all Mary’s, as if she were an anxiously motherly old lady and, at the same time, a childishly innocent young girl.

“You were gone a long time; was it a nice visit?” she asked.

“Great!” cried Mark, in a tone that left no doubt of his sincerity. “Such a collection as Mr. Moulton has made! I never saw plants pressed and preserved like his. He says he has discovered a trifling secret, but a big one, that makes his specimens less brittle. And his book is all right, too! He is writing from a new angle. I don’t see how he will ever finish it. Maybe some younger man will carry it on. That’s what he said. He said he’d be relieved to know there was some one to keep on with it if he dropped out, some one who understood his ideas thoroughly. It would mean a lot to fit one’s self to carry on this really great book, but maybe if I did my best——” Mark left his sentence unfinished.

Mary caught at its meaning eagerly. “Then Mr. Moulton does want you to help him?” she cried. “You did get on well with him?”

Mark grinned, with a boyishly sheepish look of satisfaction. “As to that, he was awfully nice and kind, in a gruff way that I liked—after I caught on to his methods. And I got so wound up over his specimens and the book plans that—well, I guess he saw I wasn’t faking it, for he thawed right out. He’s going to take me on as a—I don’t know what you would call it—amanuensis, or secretary, but, thank goodness, it’s more than that, because I’m to help with the work, if I know enough; not merely copy and put notes in order.”

Mary laughed delightedly, clasping her hands before her in an ecstatic little way that she had, as if she were congratulating herself on being glad.

“You look like another boy!” she cried. “Isn’t it fine? I’m almost as glad as you are! Mr. Moulton is a dear, the dearest of dears, but he has to be found out—like gold and jewels! And his wife is another dear. I know you will be happy, and the greatest comfort to Mr. Moulton; he’s been longing for a helper. Isn’t it fine!”

“You girls and your unc—and Win did it. Florimel made me come home with her, and you’ve all been great to me! I’m awfully grateful, though I can’t say so as I want to, Miss Gard—well, then, Mary!” Mark corrected himself, as Mary shook her head at his relapse into forbidden formality. “But ‘Miss Guard’ suits you to a T! I’m not sure I shan’t call you Miss Guard; you certainly mother this house, if you are younger than I am.”

“She smothers the house,” Jane corrected him, entering that moment. But she swung Mary off her feet in a rapid hug to illustrate her actual meaning.

“What’s happened?” cried Florimel, dashing in from the garden. Chum bounded after her; she had lost every remnant of doubt as to the sort of home she had found; indeed her manner conveyed that she had owned the house first and had kindly allowed the Gardens to use it. Florimel’s skirt was torn and she and Chum left loam tracks wherever they stepped, which seemed to be everywhere. But Chum’s expression was so foolishly blissful, and Florimel’s brilliant beauty was so irresistible, that Mary stifled her impulse to protest and beamed on the youngest Garden and the dog, inwardly resolving to repair damages before busy Abbie could see them.

“What’d he say?” panted Florimel, jumping up and down in front of Mark, whose success or failure she considered her own particular affair.

“He said we’d have a trying time, Florimel,” replied Mark, laughing at her. “He’d try me and I’d try him, and if the trial proved me competent, he’d take me into his tent and be content; but if trying me proved too trying he’d not try to try me any longer!”

“For pity’s sake!” cried Florimel, shaking Mark’s arm. “My head feels like a snarl of wool! What do you mean, anyhow? What did Mr. Moulton say, Mary?”

“Mark is going to help him, Mel,” said Mary. “I’m sure it is going to be the best thing that ever happened; I’m as happy as I can be about it. Did you know you had torn your skirt, dear? And it’s a new one.”

“I rolled over on it, Mary, too tight—I mean the skirt was pulled down under me tight when I fell over. I was sitting on my heels, weeding. And Chum thought it was a joke and ran over to bite and yank me, so I kicked out, quite hard, I suppose, because I heard that tearing, crashing sound that you read about in stories of ships striking icebergs, and when I looked——” Florimel ended her account of the disaster with a dramatic gesture downward.

“Make her mend it herself, Mary, and then wear it; she tears everything, and you mend and mend for her, and never scold her!” said Jane, frowning because Mary smiled when she should have frowned at careless Florimel.

“Certainly I shall mend it!” said Florimel, who had never been known to repair anything she had torn. “When I went with you to call on your friend, Miss Aldine, Jane, I decided to begin to mend the very first time anything happened to me! Then if Mary were sick I could mend for you, when you went on the stage, if that sloppy lot were the way you’d have to be. It was what Mrs. Moulton calls an object lesson to me.”

Jane coloured with annoyance over this allusion, but could not help laughing at the look Florimel gave her out of her dancing black eyes, her rosy face pulled down to severity as she spoke.

“It’s a precious good thing I let you go with me, Miss, if it was an object lesson and makes you spare poor Mary some of your mending,” she retorted. “There’s the telephone; I’ll answer it.”

At the end of the hall Jane took down the receiver and they heard her say: “Yes. No, it’s Jane. Oh, Mr. Moulton, I didn’t know your voice. How funny it sounds. Have you a cold? That’s good, but your voice sounds husky and queer, as if it didn’t work right. Yes, sir; we’re all here. You’ll be over in about an hour? All right, Mr. Moulton; good-bye. They’re coming over, Mr. and Mrs. Moulton,” Jane said, rejoining her sisters. “He says he has something most important and unexpected to tell us. He sounded so queer! If it had been one of us I’d have said he was excited.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” observed Mark. “You’d say she was excited.”

“Oh, dear me,” sighed Jane. “Nothing worse than fussy people! Maybe I wouldn’t; maybe Win would have been home, or you here, and I’d still have said he. Coming with me to get ready to see the Moultons, Marygold? They’ll be here so late we shall have to get dressed for supper before they come.”

“Yes. Florimel, if Mrs. Moulton saw you wearing that torn skirt I don’t know what might happen to her,” said Mary, joining Jane at the foot of the stairs.

“She’ll see me wearing a whole skirt. Wait till I put Chum out,” said Florimel.

Mary and Jane did not take Florimel’s “wait” literally. They knew that putting Chum out could hardly be called putting—it involved long coaxing and wiles, and feigned enthusiasm and excitement over a cat in the garden, which had no existence there or elsewhere. So the two older girls went on up to their rooms, leaving Florimel to the persuasion of Chum.

“What do you say it is?” asked Jane a little later, standing in Mary’s chamber door, her radiant hair falling over her white skirt and flying around her face in a glory to which Mary never became thoroughly accustomed. Jane was drying her face as she spoke; she never could be kept in the proper spot long enough to finish any part of her toilet. Mary was bent over, combing up the heavy masses of her own soft brown hair. She looked up from under it at Jane’s reflection in the mirror.

“What do I suppose what is?” Mary asked.

“What Mr. Moulton has to tell us, of course,” said Jane. “I’ve been thinking. He’s our guardian, you know, so I think it’s one of two things: Either we are a great deal poorer than we are supposed to be, or a great deal richer. His voice certainly sounded excited; the more I think of it the surer I am that Mr. Moulton’s voice was queer. When guardians in books have anything to tell their wards it is something about money, so I suppose we’re beggared, or else——”

“We’re not!” Mary ended Jane’s sentence for her with a laugh. “Just like the effect of the White Knight’s poem, which either brought tears to your eyes or it didn’t! Janie, you’re the greatest goose—for a duck! You’re precisely like the heathen imagining vain things! Mr. Moulton probably wants to talk about naming a plant for one of us; he’s been talking about that ever since he began experimenting with those hybrids of his, which are going to produce a new flower.”

“You’ll see!” said Jane, throwing out her hair and running her fingers through it till it crackled and followed them, standing out around her.

“Jane,” protested Mary, “go away! You make me think of the burning bush and ‘the pillar of fire by night,’ till I feel quite wicked and irreverent.”

Instead of going away Jane came over and kissed Mary in the hollow of the back of her neck: “If I could make you feel wicked, you old lump of goodness, you, I’d follow you around every minute. ’Tisn’t fair that Mel and I have all the Garden badness—all the weediness,” she declared.

Just as Mary and Jane ran downstairs, both fresh and lovely in pale lawns, Win came in at the front door.

“What’s up?” he asked at once. “Mr. Moulton telephoned the office for me to be home early, that he was coming here to tell us all something, and would like me to be here, if I could be. What’s up?”

“We don’t know,” began Mary, slightly disturbed, feeling that this must portend more than the naming of a new hybrid. Jane took the words out of her mouth. “We don’t know,” she said, “but I’m sure that we have had a lot of money come somehow, or else we’re so poor, everything swept away, that we’ve got to be cash girls, at four dollars a week.”

“Too much,” said Win, shaking his head. “Red-haired girls at three-fifty; that’s the rule.”

“They’re coming, anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are coming,” Florimel called over the banisters as she hurriedly buttoned her waist in the back and pulled it down into place after she had done this. “We’ll soon know what it is. Mother was English, wasn’t she? Maybe we’re earls, I mean dukes, duchesses—oh, noble!”

“We are noble, Mel,” said Win gravely; “very noble. If we weren’t noble, my dear, we should long ago have dealt with you as you deserve.”

Mark was nowhere to be seen, though he was staying this second night in Hollyhock House, having arranged to begin his service to Mr. Moulton on the next day.

“He’s a nice boy to take himself off, but Mr. Moulton can’t have anything to say that any one might not hear,” said Win, going out to meet the visitors. Yet when Win came back, stepping aside to allow the girls’ guardian to precede him into the house, there was an instant perception of something out of the ordinary on the part of the three Garden girls. It was so strong that it was as if they had not thought of it before; Mr. Moulton’s face was quite red, his manner distinctly nervous, and his wife looked greatly disturbed. Mary found it difficult to greet them, while Jane, who was like an electrical wire in receiving impressions, turned pale and put out her hand to her old friends without speaking.

“My dears,” Mr. Moulton began, having cleared his throat portentously, “I have an extraordinary announcement to make to you; nothing bad, so don’t be frightened, but it will certainly amaze you. I don’t know how to begin. Do you know your mother’s name?”

“There!” exclaimed Florimel involuntarily. “Jane said it was money, but I knew it was the nobility!”

“Lynette Devon, wasn’t it, Mr. Moulton?” said Mary, with a reproving glance at Florimel.

“Lynette Devon was her maiden name,” assented Mr. Moulton, glancing at his wife, who sat nervously on the edge of her chair, as if prepared to render any sort of aid to any one instantly. “You never heard of the manner nor time of her death, did you?” Mr. Moulton went on. “No!” he added as the three girls shook their heads and Mary clasped her hands quickly and gasped: “Oh, Mr. Moulton!”

“No, you never did. The impression that she was dead has been intentionally given you, because it was the kindest thing to do to keep you from worrying and longing to get in touch with her. But, my dears, your mother is not dead.”

The three girls sat in utter silence for a few moments after this announcement. Mary, white to the lips, clasped and unclasped her hands, looking imploringly at Mr. Moulton with her lovely brown eyes as prayerful as a dog’s. Florimel seemed dazed, and Jane, alarmingly white and thin looking—Jane had a trick of looking thin under emotion—suddenly dropped over on the arm of her chair and shook with dry sobs. Win sat silent, looking rather stern.

“We do not understand,” Mary managed to whisper at last.

“Win remembers her; he was eleven years old when she went away.” Mr. Moulton halted again over the beginning of his story.

“He never talked about her to us,” said Mary reproachfully.

“I know,” assented Mr. Moulton, watching his wife as she vainly tried to calm Jane, and finally went quietly to find Anne Kennington and ask for aromatic ammonia. “Win had a boy’s resentment against his sister-in-law for leaving you, and for leaving him, also. He was fond of her and bitterly resented her ‘deserting you,’ as he called it. I used to try to reconcile Win and teach him to judge Mrs. Garden gently, but he was too young to learn charity. He helped me to keep from you younger children the fact that she was alive—which he has not suspected, I know—by believing that she had died, and asking no questions.” Mr. Moulton smiled at the bewildered young man, who was not less stunned than the girls by this information. “Jane, my dear, try to control yourself. There is nothing about finding one’s mother alive to cry over, and I want you to hear what I say,” said Mr. Moulton, with better effect on Jane’s nerves than his wife’s prescription. Jane stood in awe of her guardian.

“Your mother, my dears, was married young. It was not so young that she had not tasted the delight of holding an audience by her charming voice—she sang like the linnet she was called—and by her remarkable talent for mimicry. She was the best mimic I ever heard; she could burlesque anybody, and imitate almost any sound. She was a great pet with audiences over in England, when she married an American, considerably her elder—your father and my friend. He took her away from her audiences and her country and set her down in the old Garden house amid the old Garden garden. Here you, her three babies, were born in four years. I knew Lynette as well as a sober codger like me could know such a radiant creature, but I never knew whether or not she longed for her professional life. Then, your father dead, Florimel a baby of a year, she suddenly announced that she could bear it no longer, but must return to her singing and entertaining. I was your guardian, children; Anne was devotion to you incarnate; your mother knew that she was leaving her babies to absolute safety, better care than most mothered babies get. Of course no one else can understand how the old life could call her with half the force your baby voices would have to hold her. Mrs. Moulton has never understood it.” Mr. Moulton glanced at his wife, who looked grimly at him in return. “I don’t understand it myself, but Lynette Devon loved her old life and she was unable to resist its lure. She went back, and all these past twelve years, while you have thought her dead, she has been entrancing the English public, quite as great a success as before her marriage.”

Mary looked at her guardian, her eyes so full of appeal that he paused.

“What is it, Mary, dear?” he asked.

“Nobody has been blaming our mother all this time, have they? She is——” Mary could not frame her question.

“She is an artist, Mary, and everything she does is worth doing, if that is what you would like to ask,” Mr. Moulton assured her. “She sings good music and does clever entertaining; every one praises her. She is a child and an artist; she could not be domestic, and, as long as her babies were comfortable and safe, she saw no reason why she should deny her nature and stay here. We cannot understand that——”

“Yes, I can!” Jane interrupted him to cry. “I couldn’t leave an animal to suffer, but I can see why she had to go back. Isn’t it wonderful, Mary?”

“Ah, but, Jane, here’s the hard part of it!” said Mr. Moulton. “You see her days of giving and getting joy in her own way were not long. Lynette is only thirty-seven now, and, though that may sound decrepit to you, it is young. And your mother’s voice is gone, her career ended. She caught a severe cold, was seriously ill for some months this last winter, and when she recovered it was but a partial recovery—her beautiful voice was completely gone. So now she is laid on the shelf. She wrote to me——”

“She wants to come home!” cried Mary, starting to her feet, and Jane and Florimel were on theirs as quickly.

“Sit down, children; she is not outside,” smiled Mr. Moulton. “She wrote me that ‘if her little girls were not angry with her for having cast them off for her career, if they would receive her, now that her career was ended and she had nothing but them to turn to, she would like to come here.’ She added that she realized that it had a contemptible look to turn to her children only when nothing else was left, but she wanted them now, and hoped that they would forgive her. She also said, quite simply and, I think, sincerely, that she ‘had to go.’”

“When will she get here?” cried Mary, still clasping and unclasping her hands, still white to the lips.

“Will any one have to go to get her?” demanded Jane. “I’ll go.”