. Well, he would like now to get up and look
out of that window and see if his garden was really there. _His garden!_
He thought with a secret feeling, half pity and half shame, of those
yellowed old seed catalogues which had come, varnished and brilliant and
new, year after year, so long ago, which he'd looked at so hard and so
long, in the evenings, and put away to get yellow and sallow like his
face . . . and his hopes. It must be almost time to "make garden," he
thought. He had heard them saying at the store that the sap was
beginning to run in the maple-trees. He would have just time to get
himself settled in his house . . . he felt an absurd young flush come up
under his grizzled beard at this phrase . . . "his house," his own house,
with bookshelves, and a garden. How he loved it all already! He sat very
still, feeling those savagely lopped-off tendrils put out their curling
fingers once more, this time unafraid. He sat there in the comfortable
old arm-chair at rest as never before. He thought, "This is the way I'm
going to feel right along, every day, all the time," and closed his
eyes.

He opened them again in a moment, moved subconsciously by the life-time
habit of making sure what Vincent was up to. He smiled at the keen look
of alert, prick-eared attention which the other was still giving to that
room! Lord, how Vincent did love to get things all figured out! He
probably had, by this time, an exact diagram of the owners of the house
all drawn up in his mind and would probably spend the hour of their
call, seeing if it fitted. Not that _they_ would have any notion he was
doing anything but talk a blue streak, or was thinking of anything but
introducing an old friend.

One thing he wanted in his garden was plenty of gladioli. Those poor,
spindling, watery ones he had tried to grow in the window-box, he'd
forget that failure in a whole big row all along the terrace, tall and
strong, standing up straight in the country sunshine. What was the
address of that man who made a specialty of gladioli? He ought to have
noted it down. "Vincent," he asked, "do you remember the address of that
Mr. Schwatzkummerer who grew nothing but gladioli?" Vincent was looking
with an expression of extreme astonishment at the sheet of music on the
piano. He started at the question, stared, recollected himself, laughed,
and said, "Heavens, no, Mr. Welles!" and went back into his own world.
There were lots of things, Mr. Welles reflecte