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The young girls still came there for pleasure, because of the cold water, the roses, and the raspberries; but the ill-cultivated raspberries perished, the rose-vines ran wild, climbed to the tops of the high walls, and offered their dusty blossoms to the travellers on the road.
The rose-vines were whipped from the veranda and flung writhing in all directions. The trees in the compound strove like terrified creatures in the grip of a giant. The heat of the blast was like tongues of flame blown from an immense furnace. Merryon's whole body seemed to be wrapped in fire. With a fierce movement, he stripped the coat from him and flung it into the room behind him.
Then she went on to tell how, as she sat in a deep chair at the end of a long pergola where small, juicy leaves of Dorothy Perkins rose-vines and of crimson ramblers made a green May mist over the line of arches, Halarkenden had come down under them to her. "I believe I shall never be in a garden without expecting to see him stalk down a path," she said.
It is only a few miles away from the Rhine perhaps too far for you to walk, but not too far for me that we shall find a fine large house, a house with pleasant gardens about it, broad gravel walks, and soft, green grass-plats to play upon, and gay flowering trees and bushes, while the rose-vines are climbing over the piazza, and opening rose-buds are peeping in at the chamber windows.
The sun, a ball of fire, went slowly down the west. Rose-vines drooped against the hanging lattices, printing their watery lines of split bamboo with a shadow-pattern of leaf and flower. The whole house-front was decked with dead roses, or roses blasted in full bloom, as if to celebrate with appropriate insignia the passing of the hottest day of the year.
And as she staggered, benumbed and dazed, to her feet she almost fell over a slimy knife lying there, and at that instant a strong hand flung back the rose-vines and Harry Kendal, white and quivering with wrath, confronted her. "Dorothy Glenn!" he cried, in a horrible voice fairly reverberating with intense emotion, "You! Oh, you cruel, wicked girl!
He drew up the piazza-blinds, and like a stage-scene, framed in post and balustrade, and bordered with a tracery of rose-vines, the valley burst upon the view. Its cool twilight colors, its river-bed of mist, added to the depth of distance. Against it the white roses looked whiter, and the pink ones caught fire from the intense, great afterglow.
Her mother and sister came with her for good-byes to the old porch with its peeling dark paint and woody rose-vines. "Pa said at noon that you had 'phoned you wanted to come say good-bye," said her mother mildly. "I hope you'll always be happy, Martie, and remember that we did our best for you.
She let her eyes rove down the lengths of empty piazza. The close-reefed awnings revealed the stars above the trees, dark and breezeless on the lawn. The matted rose-vines clung to the pillars motionless. "What a strange, dear place!" she murmured. "And there is no one here?" "No one at all. We are quite alone. We really must have you." "I will stay, then.
Above her head was a tight-drawn canopy made of an enormous flag; and on the white floor, wedged tightly against the canvas wall, were pots containing long rose-vines that made a drapery of leaves and flowers. Here and there folds of the great flag were looped back with wooden shields, gilded and painted with coats of arms the crest of the Holbeins, no doubt, invented to order at great expense.
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