Olivia Page could make almost anything grow, as she had abundantly proved, but even her garden-craft could hardly suffice for the setting of a sun-dial on a pedestal of snow-white marble over there where the four triangular rose-beds converged to a circle, and where the south sun would play on it all day long.
For a year Olivia had dreamed of this, and, since she was not a churlishly reticent young person, it was not the first intimation her father had received of her desire. Not until to-day, however, had she asked outright for what she wanted.
"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?