here she
slipped her hand in the belt of her gown and drew out a little chamois
bag attached to her watch, "and for an omen, here is the opal you gave
me--you give it a happy interpretation and one is very apt to lose an
unset stone, you know!"

But as neither walls nor leaves have tongues, Mary Penrose never learned
the real ins and outs of this matter.

XVIII

THE VALUE OF WHITE FLOWERS

(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)

_Oaklands, September 29._ Michaelmas. The birthdays of our commuters are
not far apart. This being Evan's festival, we have eaten the annual
goose in his honour, together with several highly indigestible
old-country dishes of Martha Corkle's construction, for she comes down
from the cottage to preside over this annual feast. Now the boys have
challenged Evan to a "golf walk" over the Bluffs and back again, the
rough-and-ready course extending that distance, and I, being "o'er weel
dined," have curled up in the garden-overlook window of my room to write
to you.

It has been a good gardener's year, and I am sorry that the fall
anemones and the blooming of the earliest chrysanthemums insist upon
telling me that it is nearly over,--that is, as far as the reign of
complete garden colour is concerned. And amid our vagrant summer
wanderings among gardens of high or low degree, no one point has been so
recurrent or interesting as the distribution of colour, and especially
the dominance of white flowers in any landscape or garden in which they
appear.

In your last letter you speak of the preponderance of white among the
flowering shrubs as well as the early blossoms of spring. That this is
the case is one of the strong points in the decorative value of shrubs,
and in listing seeds for the hardy or summer beds or sorting the bushes
for the rosary, great care should be taken to have a liberal sprinkling
of white, for the white in the flower kingdom is what the diamond is in
the mineral world, necessary as a setting for all other colours, as well
as for its own intrinsic worth.

Look at a well-cut sapphire of flawless tint. It is beautiful surely,
but in some way its depth of colour needs illumination. Surround it with
evenly matched diamonds and at once life enters into it.

Fill a tall jar with spires of larkspur of the purest blue known to
garden flowers. Unless the sun shines fully on them they seem to swallow
light; mingle with them some stalks of white foxgloves, Canterbury
bells, o