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Rose turned the latch very gently, and opened the door a few inches. A flood of golden sunlight swept in, and just outside the tall holly-hocks in gorgeous coloring swayed in the soft breeze. "Hear them rustle just as if they were paper flowers," whispered Polly. "Oh, it's lovely out there." "Let's go out just a little way."
He walked around it, looking at himself in the glasses as he passed; approved the panels where guardsmen and amazons were drinking champagne in a landscape filled with red holly-hocks; called for his absinthe, smoked, found the divan soft and the absinthe good, and was indulgent enough not to complain of the flies who bathed themselves in his glass with true rustic familiarity.
For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as though they offered an explanation. Then she went in and up-stairs, hesitated on the landing, and finally, a little breathless and with an air of great dignity, opened the door and walked into Ann Veronica's room.
Naught remains save the thatched roof, many feet deep, the green porch over the hall door, the stone seat round the streaky apple-tree at the garden gate, and the garden itself, where the largest lilies I have ever seen stand in the sun, and the apple-trees are in the garden-beds, the holly-hocks elbow the gooseberries, and the violets push out their little clumps in the celery-bed.
"I'll find Sir Mortimer, and tell him Rose is coming to see us soon," she said. She ran along the path, out onto the avenue, then up the broad driveway of Sherwood Hall. As she passed the holly-hocks, she saw the big cat lying in front of them, basking in the sun.
There was the clump of holly-hocks, and close beside it, the little green door. "Good-bye, good-bye!" they cried to Lester, "and thank you, oh thank you, but we must hurry!" Lester waved his cap to them, and then raced down the avenue. Then, treading softly, they ran along the little path, past the holly- hocks, and the little green door was closed.
She had amusing things to sew upon, little tarltan skirts for children who were to appear in a huge charitable "May Day" entertainment. They were of gay colors, those frills, like big holly-hocks, she thought as she flung the finished things into a hamper. She helped to make other costumes too, sitting with a score of seamstresses in the auditorium of one of the churches.
Behind us the sun's declining rays fell upon an old-fashioned garden of holly-hocks and asters, so that the effect, as one caught it turning sideways, was like light upon a stained-glass window, so rich were the dyes. I saw all this only as one sees the surroundings of some object that interests supremely. The man who had been walking with me said simply, "This is my wife."
It was enough thought for him to listen to the whispered stories of the sisters in the long evenings, and, half-heard, try and make an end to them; to look drowsily down into the garden, where the afternoon sunshine was still so summer-like that a few holly-hocks persisted in showing their honest red faces along the walls, and the very leaves that filled the paths would not wither, but kept up a wholesome ruddy brown.
The white, colonial house set back from the broad Hudson River among locust trees and tall, rustling maples; the sloping lawn, with the beds of geranium and verbena; the garden with its dear, old-fashioned flowers holly-hocks, sweet-williams, bleeding-hearts, grass pinks, and yellow roses; the grey-green hills across the water; that picture stood to me for all that was ideal on earth.
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