“’The doctors say it’s something to do with the ’sociation of smells, for that season they spent in my cottage was the only vacation Dr. Marchant had taken in years, and they say it was the happiest time in her life, fussing about among my old-fashioned posies with him; and somehow in her mind he’s got fixed there among those posies, and every year she plants more and more of them, and what friends of hers she ever speaks of she remembers by some flowers they wore or liked.

“’Well, as it turned out, her trustees have bought my place out and fixed it over, and here we live together, I may say, both fairly content!

“’Come in and see her, won’t you?  It’ll do no harm.  Cortright, did you say your name was?’ and before we could retreat, throwing Brown Tom’s loose check-rein across the pickets of the gate, she led us to where the tall woman, dressed in pure white, stood under the trees, a look of perfectly calm expectancy in the wonderful dark eyes that made such a contrast to her coils of snow-white hair.

“‘Cortright!  Martin Cortright, is it not?’ she said immediately, as her companion spoke the surname.  ’And your wife?  I had not heard that you were married, but I remember you well, Lavinia Dorman, and your city garden, and the musk-rose bush that ailed because of having too little sun.  Chester will be so sorry to miss you; he is seldom at home in the mornings, for he takes long walks with our son.  He is having the first entire half year’s vacation he has allowed himself since our marriage.  But you will always find him in the garden in the afternoon; he is so fond of fragrant flowers, and he is making new studies of herbs and such things, for he believes that in spite of some great discoveries it will be proven that the old simples are the most enduring medicines.’

“As she spoke she was leading the way, with that peculiar undulating progress, like a cloud blown over the earth’s surface, that I had noticed at first.  Then we came out from under the shade of the trees into the garden enclosure and I saw borders and beds, but chiefly borders, stretching and curving everywhere, screening all the fences, approaching the house, and when almost there retreating in graceful lines into the shelter of the trees.  The growth had the luxuriance of a jungle, and yet there was nothing weedy or awry about it, and as the breeze blew toward us the combination of many odours, both pungent and sweet, was almost overpowering.

“’You very seldom wore a buttonhole flower, but when you did it was a safrano bud or else a white jasmine,’ Mrs. Marchant said, wheeling suddenly and looking at Martin with a gaze that did not stop where he stood, but went through and beyond him; ’it was Dr. Russell who always wore a pink!  See!  I have both here!’ and going up to a tea-rose bush, grown to the size of a shrub and lightly fastened to the side of the house, she gathered a few shell-like buds and a moment later pulled down a spray of the jasmine vine that festooned a window, as we see it in England but never here, and carefully cut off a cluster of its white stars by aid of a pair of the long, slender flower-picking scissors that hung from her belt by a ribbon, twisted the stems together, and placed them in Martin’s buttonhole almost without touching it.