with" him when they were little girls and their mother married him. They
never suggested that mother married him any time within their
remembrance. In their determined state of mind he belonged not only to
the never-ending end when he and they and mother were to meet in a
gardened heaven with running streams and bowery trees, but as well to
the vague past when they were little girls. Their own father they had
memory of only as a disturbing large person in rough tweed smelling of
office smoke, who was always trying to get somewhere before the domestic
exigencies of breakfast and carriage would let him, and who dropped dead
one day trying to do it. Anne saw him fall right in the middle of the
gravel walk, and ran to tell mother father had stubbed his toe. And when
she heard mother scream, and noted father's really humorous obstinacy
about getting up, and saw the cook even and the coachman together trying
to persuade him, she got a strong distaste for father; and when about
two years afterward she was asked if she would accept this other older
father, she agreed to him with cordial expectation. He was gentle and
had a smooth, still voice. His clothes smelled of Russia leather and
lead pencils and at first of very nice smoke: not as if he had sat in a
tight room all day and got cured in the smoke of other rank pipes like a
helpless ham, but as if a pleasant acrid perfume were his special
atmosphere.

"They haven't done much to the garden, have they?" he asked now, poking
with his stick in the beds under the windows. "I suppose you girls know
what these things are, coming up. There's a peony. I do know that. I
remember this one. It's the old dark kind, not pink. I don't much care
for a pink piny."

The big front yard sloping up to the house was almost full of shrubbery
in a state of overgrown prosperity. There were lilacs, dark with buds,
and what Anne, who was devotedly curious in matters of growing life,
thought althea, snowball and a small-leaved yellow rose. All this
runaway shrubbery looked, in a way of speaking, inpenetrable. It would
have taken so much trouble to get through that you would have felt
indiscreet in trying it. The driveway only seemed to have been brave
enough to pass it without getting choked up, a road that came in at the
big gateway, its posts marked by haughty granite balls, accomplished a
leisurely curve and went out at another similar gateway as proudly
decorated. The house held dignified seclusi