Marsh would be likely to tell me, very likely a good deal more than is true.  I know for instance, . . .” she laughed and corrected herself, “. . . at least I’ve been told, what the purchase price of the house was.  I know how Harry Wood’s sister-in-law’s friend told you about Ashley and the house in the first place.  I know how many years you were in the service of the Company, and how your pension was voted unanimously by the Directors, and about the silver loving-cup your fellow employees in the office gave you when you retired; and indeed every single thing about you, except the exact relation of the elderly invalid to whose care you gave up so generously so much of your life; I’m not sure whether I she was an aunt or a second-cousin.”  She paused an instant to give them a chance to comment on this, but finding them still quite speechless, she went on.  “And now I know another thing, that you like gladioli, and that is a real bond.”

She was interrupted here by a great explosive laugh from Vincent.  It was his comment on her speech to them, and for a time he made no other, eyeing her appreciatively as she and Mr. Welles talked garden together, and from time to time chuckling to himself.  She gave him once a sidelong amused glance, evidently liking his capacity to laugh at seeing the ground cut away from under his feet, evidently quite aware that he was still thinking about that, and not at all about Mr. Welles and tulip-beds.  Welles was relieved at this.  Apparently she was going to “take” Vincent the right way.  Some ladies were frightfully rubbed the wrong way by that strange great laugh of Vincent’s.  And what she knew about gardening!  And not only about gardening in general, but about his own garden.  He was astounded at her knowledge apparently of every inch of the quadrangle of soil back of his house, and at the revelations she made to him of what could lie sleeping under a mysterious blank surface of earth.  Why, a piece of old ground was like a person.  You had to know it, to have any idea of all that was hidden in its bosom, good and bad.  “There never was such a place for pigweed as the lower end of your vegetable lot,” she told him; “you’ll have to get up nights to fight it if there is plenty of rain this summer.”  And again, “Be careful about not digging too close to the east wall of your terrace.  There is a border of peonies there, splendid pink ones, and you’re likely to break off the shoots.  They don’t show so early as the red ones near the walk, that get more sun.”

“Did you ever use to live in that house?” he asked her, respectful of her mastery of its secrets.

She laughed.  “No, oh no.  We’ve lived right here all the eleven years of our life in Vermont.  But there’s another side to the local wireless information-bureau that let me know all about you before you ever got here.  We all know all about everybody and everything, you know.  If you live in the country you’re really married to humanity, for better or for worse,