“I suppose,” he said to himself one morning, with a mighty sigh, “I suppose there is only one way out of it all.  I really must take a liking to red hair.  Well! not just yet.”

It was about ten o’clock in the morning when he said this, and he was setting out to walk across the fields, and call for the first time on Mrs. Frederic Walker.  He was taking his three younger children with him to make an apology to her.

Now that Mrs. Walker was a widow, she and Mr. Mortimer had half unconsciously changed their manner slightly towards each other; they were just as friendly as before, but not so familiar; the children, however, were very intimate with her.

“She didn’t want that bit of garden,” argued little Hugh, as one who felt aggrieved; “and when she saw that we had taken it she only laughed.”

The fact was, that finding a small piece of waste ground at the back of Mrs. Walker’s shrubbery, the children had dug it over, divided it with oyster-shells into four portions, planted it with bulbs and roots, and in their own opinion it was now theirs.  They came rather frequently to dig in it.  Sometimes on these occasions they went in-doors to see “Mrs. Nemily,” and perhaps partake of bread and jam.  Once they came in to complain of her gardener, who had been weeding in their gardens.  They wished her to forbid this.  Emily laughed, and said she would.

Their course of honest industry was, however, discovered at last by the twins; and now they were to give up the gardens, which seemed a sad pity, just when they had been intending to put in spring crops.

Some people never really have anything.  It is not only that they can get no good out of things (that is common even among those who are able both to have and to hold), but that they don’t know how to reign over their possessions and appropriate them.

Their chattels appear to know this, and despise them; their dogs run after other men; the best branches of their rose-trees climb over the garden-wall, and people who smell at the flowers there appear to supply a reason for any roses being planted inside.  Such people always know their weak point, and spend their own money as if they had stolen it.

The little Mortimers were not related to them.  Here was a piece of ground which nobody cultivated; it manifestly wanted owners; they took it, weeded it, and flung out all the weeds into Mrs. Walker’s garden.

The morning was warm; a south wind was fluttering the half-unfolded leaf-buds, and spreading abroad the soft odour of violets and primroses which covered the sunny slopes.

John’s children, when they came in at Mrs. Walker’s drawing-room window, brought some of this delicate fragrance of the spring upon their hair and clothes.  Grown-up people are not in the habit of rolling about, or tumbling down over beds of flowers.  They must take the consequences, and leave the ambrosial scents of the wood behind them.