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Between the hill and the road, at the foot of a ravine that runs down at right angles, room enough has been scooped out, partly by the rains and partly by the pick, for the house, offices and microscopic yard decorated with hollyhocks and larkspurs.
The windows at the rear have small panes; the lower sashes are raised; the tops of the hollyhocks and foxgloves in the garden bed may be seen above the window sills, and the apple trees beyond. Under the windows is a long table, on which are chemical apparatus. A white enamelled sink is in the rear right corner. The walls are whitewashed, the wooden floor bare.
I stood and gazed in delighted astonishment. Sun-gilded trees and flower beds gay with blossom; lupins, snapdragons, nasturtiums, spiry foxgloves, and mighty hollyhocks formed the foreground; over which a pair of sulphur-tinted butterflies flitted, unmindful of a buxom and miraculously clean white cat which pursued them, dancing across the borders and clapping her snowy paws fruitlessly in mid-air.
Sylvia viewed the old building with appreciation. It stood, long and low and cleanly white-washed, on the brink of a deep ghyll filled with lichened boulders and russet ferns, with a firwood close behind it, and in front a wide vista of moors and fells that stood out darkly blue against the evening light. Near the stone porch, a rustic table stood beside a row of tall red hollyhocks.
Rand, unseen, watched the manoeuvres for a while, then coughed to let them know he was there, and presently sat down upon a root of cedar, and gave Deb his opinion of the flower people. Children and he were always at their ease together. "Hollyhocks make the finest ladies," he announced gravely. "Little Miss Randolph puts snapdragon caps upon them and gives them scarfs of ribbon grass."
Long-neglected flowers damask and cabbage roses, zinnias, cock's-comb, hollyhocks grew half-wild, making masses of glowing color. Along the walks, where there had paced, a hundred years before, stately Lewis ladies in brocade and stately Lewis gentlemen in velvet coats, now tripped an orphan girl, a stranger in her father's home.
Here Felix was at work, with Barbara following at his heels, and helping, when each tree was planted, to hold it upright while he pressed down the earth about its roots. "We will leave an open space through the center," he said, "a lane that will lead straight up toward the house, so that when Ralph and I come home we can look up to the open door and the hollyhocks around the step.
The whole place was overgrown with long, broken weeds, battered into tangled masses by the blasts of winter; at his feet were heaps of smitten burdocks and the dead, smothered stems of hollyhocks, geraniums and other garden plants set out and nurtured with tender care by Rachel Gwyn during her years of occupancy.
The flowered cottage on the road to Tinnick stood in the midst of trees, on a knoll some few feet above the roadway, and Father Oliver, when he was a boy, often walked out by himself from Tinnick to see the hollyhocks and the sunflowers; they overtopped the palings, the sunflowers looking like saucy country girls and the hollyhocks like grand ladies, delicate and refined, in pink muslin dresses.
And then he said: "It seems to me that you are the one that ought to buzz around the hollyhocks, since you are so nervous about the Robber Fly." The worker, Peevish Peggy, at once flew into a temper. "You'd better look out!" she warned Buster. "Once the Robber Fly pounces on you you'll be so frightened you can't even squirm." "Oh, nonsense!" said Buster.
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