has
discovered that though they listen respectfully while he plays
his own beloved music, mostly they are happier when he gives
them a bit of American ragtime, or a popular song hit. His
distaste for that sort of thing is very funny. One would think
he had desecrated his beloved violin when he condescends to
it, for afterward he invariably gives it a special polishing
with the old silk handkerchief he keeps in the case--and Miss
Arden vows he washes his hands, too. Poor Franz! Your real
artist has a hard time of it in this prosaic world doesn't he?

The note ended by saying boldly that King would like another sketch
sometime, and he even ventured to suggest that he would enjoy seeing a
picture of that row of white lilac trees at the edge of the garden where
Anne used to play. It was two days before he got this, and meanwhile a
box of water colours had come into requisition. When the sheet of heavy
paper came to King he lay looking at it with eyes which sparkled.

At first sight it was just a blur of blues and greens, with irregular
patches of white, and gay tiny dashes of strong colour, pinks and
purples and yellows. But when, as Anne had bidden him, he held it at
arm's length he saw it all--the garden with its box-bordered beds full
of tall yellow tulips and pink and white and purple hyacinths--it was
easy to see that this was what they were, even from the dots and dashes
of colour; the hedge--it was a real hedge of white lilac trees, against
a spring sky all scudding clouds of gray. Like the sketch of Franz, its
charm lay entirely in suggestion, not in detail, but was none the less
real for that.

There was one thing which, to King's observant eyes, stood out plainly
from the little wash drawing. This garden was a garden of the rich, not
of the poor. Just how he knew it so well he could hardly have told,
after all, for there was no hint of house, or wall, or even
summer-house, sundial, terrace, or other significant sign. Yet it was
there, and he doubted if Anne Linton knew it was there, or meant to have
it so. Perhaps it was that lilac hedge which seemed to show so plainly
the hand of a gardener in the planting and tending. The question
was--was it her own garden in which she had played, or the garden of her
father's employer? Had her father been that gardener, perchance? King
instantly rejected this possibility.

CHAPTER VII

WHITE LILACS

Burns, coming in