"Let's look!" and the brown little fist of one of the youngest of the Others was thrust forth.
"All that fuss about those! You wait a minute!"
He ran off, returning shortly with quite a big bunch of my yellow treasures in his hand.
"Where did you get them? Jim, you bad boy! you must not pick my flowers," I exclaimed.
"_Your_ flowers! and you hadn't an idea that they grew there. These are from _my_ garden, and no one has given _me_ a fiver to raise them with. Come, Mary, I shall cry halves. You had better square me!"
"Oh, Jim, where did you find them?" was all I could gasp.
I did square Jim, but it was in "kind," and then he showed me much winter aconite hidden away in an unfrequented shrubbery, where his quick little eyes had spied it. I thought of moving it to where it would show. Everything with me was for show in those early days; but these surprises hold their own delight, and I learnt to encourage them.
I suffered many things at the hands of the Others for spending five pounds on winter aconite when already the garden held "such heaps "--that was their way of putting it.
I began to hope that more surprises of such sort might be in store for me. It is wonderful how one may avoid seeing what is really just under one's nose. The Others might laugh, but I doubt if they even knew winter aconite as the yellow buttercup-looking thing before that morning.
Another yellow flower tried to relieve the monotony of that dead season of the year. Struggling up the front of the house, through the virginian creeper and old Gloire de Dijon rose, were the bare branches of a yellow jasmine. From the end of December on through January and February it did its poor best to strike a note of colour in the gloom. But why was it not more successful? Judging from its performance, I had formed the meanest opinion of its capabilities, until one bright day in January my eye had been caught by a mass of yellow--I say advisedly a mass--thrown over the rickety porch of old Master Lovell's abode. Yellow jasmine! yes, there was no mistake about it, but the bare greenish stems were covered with the brilliant little star-flowers, shining and rejoicing as in the full tide of summer. I thought of my bare straggling specimen and stopped to ask for the recipe for such blossoming. Old Lovell and old Griggs had both lived in Fairleigh all their lives, and there was an old-timed and well-ripened feud between the pair.