It was not much the fashion then to have rare garden-flowers.  Our conservatory contained a fair array of these, but we had beds of tulips, hyacinths, and crocuses, basking in the sunshine, and violets and lilies lying in the shadow such as I see rarely now, and which cost us as little thought or trouble in their perennial permanence, whereas the conservatory was an endless grief and care, although superintended by a thoroughly-taught English gardener, and kept up at unlimited expense.

My sister—­for so I was taught to call Evelyn Erle—­revelled in this floral exclusiveness, but to me the dear old garden was far more delightful and life-giving.  I loved our sweet home-flowers better than those foreign blossoms which lived in an artificial climate, and answered no thrilling voice of Nature, no internal impulse in their hot-house growth and development.  What stirred me so deeply in April, stirred also the hyacinth-bulb and the lily of the valley deep in the earth—­warmth, moisture, sunshine and shadow, and sweet spring rain—­and the same fullness of life that throbbed in my veins in June called forth the rose.  There was vivid sympathy here, and I gave my heart to the garden-flowers as I never could do to the frailer children of the hot-house, beautiful as they undeniably are.

“Miriam has really a vulgar taste for Nature, as Miss Glen calls it,” Evelyn said one day, with a curl of her slight, exquisite lip as she shook away from her painted muslin robe, the butter-cups, heavy with moisture and radiant with sunshine, which I had laid upon her knee.  “She ought to have been an Irish child and born, in a hovel, don’t you think so, papa?” and she put me aside superciliously.  Dirt and Nature were synonymous terms with her.

My father smiled and laid down his newspaper, then looked at me a little gravely as I stood downcast by Evelyn.

“You are getting very much sunburnt, Miriam, there is no doubt of that.  A complexion like yours needs greater care for its preservation than if ten shades fairer.  Little daughter, you must wear your bonnet, or give up running in the garden in the heat of the day.”

“I try to impress this on Miriam all the time,” said Mrs. Austin, coming as usual to aid in the assault, “but she is so hard-headed, it is next to impossible to make her mindful of what I tell her.  Miss Glen is the only one that seems to have any influence over her nowadays.”  She said this with a slight, impatient toss of the head, as she paused in her progress through the room with a huge jar of currant-jelly, she had been sunning in the dining-room window, poised on the palm of either hand, jelly that looked like melted rubies, now to be consigned to the store-room.

“Well, well, we must have patience,” was the rejoinder.  “She is young—­impulsive (I wish she were more like you, Evelyn, my dear!), her mother over again in temperament, without the saving clauses of beauty and refinement; these she will never attain, I fear, and with much of the characteristic persistence of that singular race, which in my wife, however, I never detected, though so much nearer the fountain-head!” This was said half in soliloquy, but Evelyn replied to it as if it had been addressed to her—­replied, as she often did, by an interrogatory.