"I wish you would say something more," she remarked, glancing sidewise
at the professor's deeply corrugated countenance, which, for all their
intimacy, was sometimes difficult to decipher. She had heard of girls
who could twist their parents round their fingers; she wondered how
they did it.

The two were sitting on the white half-circle of a bench that stood at
the west boundary of the old tennis-court, just where one end of the
net used to be staked up. Excepting for that break, three sides of the
garden were fenced in by the high wire screen originally designed to
keep the tennis balls within bounds, and now doing duty as a trellis
over which a luxuriant woodbine clambered, waving its reddening
tendrils in the light September breeze. Wide flowerbeds bordered the
entire court, the central turf being broken only by the cluster of
rose-beds at the further end. From the white bench one looked across
the grass to a broad flight of veranda steps, flanked on the right by
a mass of white boltonia, while on the left a superb growth of New
England asters reared their sturdy heads.

The garden had been a great success this year, quite the admiration of
the neighbourhood. Really, Papa must be proud of it, and it was all
Olivia's doing. Who would ever guess that it had had its modest
beginnings in half a dozen tin cracker-boxes with holes bored in the
bottoms, where, in March, two years ago, she had planted queer little
brown seeds as hard as pebbles, which Nature had straightway taken in
hand, softening and expanding them down there in the dark, till they
came alive, and began feeling their way up to meet the sun. Ah, the
bliss of seeing those first tiny shoots turn into stems and leaflets,
ready to play their part in the great spring awakening! Would Olivia
ever love any flowers quite as she had loved those first seedlings,
especially a certain pentstemon, which blossomed "white with purple
spots," exactly as the seed-catalogue had promised?

Yes, the garden was a great success, and just now it was at one of its
prettiest moments, gay with autumn colours; the rudbeckia in its
glory, and the great pink blossoms of the hibiscus spreading their
skirts for all the world like ladies in an old-time minuet, while over
yonder the soldier spikes of the flame-flower threatened to set the
woodbine afire. Olivia loved the Latin names, but somehow "tritonia"
did not seem to express those spikes of burning colour. And the roses!
How lov