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I continue cutting my lawn, planting my dahlias, pruning my roses, tying up my flowering peas, and watching my California poppies grow like the weeds in the fields. When I am not doing that, with a pot in one hand, and the tongs in the other, I am picking slugs out of the flower-beds and giving them a dose of boiling water, or lugging about a watering-pot.
A broad avenue led from the bridge to the chateau, passing by carefully clipped shrubbery, whence marble statues peeped out here and there, and a beautiful garden, with flower-beds ingeniously laid out in geometrical patterns, and brilliant with well contrasted colours.
For the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants.
It was to be only a story-and-a-half cottage of six small rooms, the two upper chambers to be finished off later on. Stephen had placed it well back from the road, leaving space in front for what was to be a most wonderful arrangement of flower-beds, yet keeping a strip at the back, on the river-brink, for a small vegetable garden.
And then she set to work and tore up by the roots with her little hands and trampled with her little feet all the beautiful tender flower-beds; all the time weeping, and moaning softly: "Poor Cousin Evelina! poor Cousin Evelina! Oh, forgive me, poor Cousin Evelina!"
Then, as he crossed the park with its beautiful old trees and lake and flower-beds, approaching Buckingham Palace from an entirely different angle than he had ever seen it before, he realized for the first time that it was in the midst of a beautiful sylvan setting.
Taking his broad-brimmed gardening hat from the table, the pastor went down among his flower-beds, followed by Biörn, to whose innate asperity of temper was added the snarling fretfulness of old age.
In the corners hung spiders' webs; in the rooms stood dust in heaps; pigeons built their nests in the cornices and sparrows in the beams. Heaps of withered leaves lay rotting in the garden; weeds grew over the tanks; the flower-beds were hidden by jungle.
To the north a piece of level land, made into an island by the severed branches of a river, bore, by its position, all the beauty and aptitude for human habitation that nature could bestow; and the clean, white cottages with their red roofs and spires of ascending smoke, its gardens with their symmetrical flower-beds, and its cultivated fields, teemed with every sign of ease and plenty, and revealed the ingenuity of man.
She went up the avenue leading to the house; he followed close behind her. He was silent, for he found not a word to say. A drowsy feeling of uneasy languor came over him; he asked himself whether he could overtake her, or whether she were a hundred miles away. She walked with her head bent, looking down at the flower-beds.
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