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Every motorist coming up that road would see the signboard outside the pepper trees, and would certainly want to stop at the neat little gate, and pass through the flowery tunnel that would be cut through the syringas, and see what was inside.
Sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself.
It remembered how it had been persecuted and derided, and now it heard all say it was the most beautiful of birds. And the syringas bent down their branches to it in the water, and the sun shone so lovely and so warm. Then it shook its plumes, the slender neck was lifted up, and, from its very heart, it cried rejoicingly 'Never dreamed I of such happiness when I was the little ugly duck!"
But, to say the truth, he cared little for their conversation; for had he not turned aside down one of the retired gravel paths in the garden, alone with Frida? "That's General Claviger of Herat, I suppose," he said in a low tone, as they retreated out of ear-shot beside the clump of syringas. "What a stern old man he is, to be sure, with what a stern old face!
When he had gone, I too slipped away, for the still white night outside called me. I went around to that favorite retreat of mine, the battered seat shut in among spireas and syringas. I like to say my rosary out of doors. The beads slipping through my fingers soothed me with their monotonous insistent petition.
The words were: "Oh, what a doctor's bill there'll be for this!" She walked round and round the garden among the rose-bushes that hadn't any roses yet, only buds, and the lilac bushes and syringas and American currants, and the more she thought of the doctor's bill, the less she liked the thought of it. And presently she made up her mind.
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