Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
One reason of this, no doubt, lay in the fact that Captain Polkington had not brought his purchase home with him that evening. He had meant to; when the carrier set him and his property down just outside Halgrave, he had fully meant to carry it to the cottage. But he found it so heavy and cumbersome in his weak and dejected state that he had to give it up.
And it is doubtful if, in all the country round, there was a happier man than he who tended Julia's plants in Julia's garden, and drove parties of chattering children along the quiet lanes, and sat on warm summer evenings beside his old friend's grave in Halgrave churchyard. He had forgotten many things, old slights and old pains, and old losses; forgotten, perhaps, most things except love.
Julia, in the meantime, did her shopping, and, having loaded herself with as much as she could carry more than most people could except those Continental maids and mistresses who do their own marketing, she started for home. It was a long walk a long way to Halgrave and a good bit beyond that to the cottage.
It was a fine afternoon following after two or three wet days and the ground was in splendid condition for planting, also for sticking to clothes. The sandy road to Halgrave dried quickly, but the garden, of heavier soil, did not, as was testified by Julia's boots she had bought a small pair of plough-boy's boots that spring and was wearing them now, very pleased with the investment.
Ponsonby, also made the tedious journey to Halgrave; he came out of respect for death in the abstract, and also because he expected affairs would want looking to, and it would suit him better to do it now than later.
Julia stood a moment by the gate. Before her lay the road to Halgrave; her father might have gone down it a little way; but if he had he must have turned off and sought concealment somewhere for she had seen no sign of any one when she came home. To the left stretched the heath-land, brown and bare, to the belt of wildly tossing pines; it was hard to imagine her father choosing that way.
Julia came home from Halgrave later than she expected, but the wind had increased to a gale, so that walking along the exposed road had been no easy matter. Johnny by this time was almost desperate with alarm, for Captain Polkington had not come back and, in spite of a continuous search in likely and unlikely places, he had not been able to find any trace of him or his whisky.
He wished he had known sooner that Julia was going to Halgrave, he would have begun getting up before this; he would even have got to breakfast if only she had let him know; so he fumed to himself as he shuffled about, dropping things with his shaking fingers.
And in due time the wonderful streaked daffodil, "Narcissus Triandrus Striatum, The Good Comrade," grown by Miss Snooks of White's Cottage, Halgrave, was exhibited at the Temple Show. And bulb growers, professional and amateur, waxed enthusiastic over it. And the general public who went to the show, admired it or not, as their taste and education allowed them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking