stone; and its door was painted with that queer green-blue that, however faded, contrives somehow always to look vivid, and that you see so often at the seaside in England, and so seldom anywhere else. The garden, too, was a little different from its neighbours. Snapdragons grew in the wide borders on either side the narrow red-brick path that led from gate to door—old-fashioned, ordinary snap-dragons, purplish-crimson with the sulphur mouth; and there were tall wands of golden rod, verbenas purple and rose, and masses of ardent orange marigolds with dark eyes. A creamy-white clematis, too, full of tiny flowers that smelt strong of almonds, hung like a shower of stars against the blue lattice of the porch; but the most noticeable thing about the garden was its abundance of Michaelmas daisies. In great clumps, almost bushes, they grew up and down each border; they were of every possible shade of purple, from the royalest Tyrian to the palest mauve, and the clumps were all most carefully tied up.
As Mrs. Nye paused to admire them, an old woman came out of the cottage with a hank of flax in her hands, to bind one up that had begun to straggle; a dumpy little old woman, in a dress of grey, and a sun-bonnet of washed-out purple print, very much the colour of some of the daisies, and “just the livin’ double of Aunt Sarah Jane’s, at Minster,” Mrs. Nye said to herself. The old lady was too much absorbed in her task to notice anything beyond it, and Mrs. Nye could not resist standing still a little while to watch her. “Ties it up just as tender as tyin’ a child in its pinny, don’t she?” she mused. But presently the
