lossoms in a flowery snow over the grass. For a moment Miss
Priscilla turned her flushed face to the scented air, while her eyes
rested lovingly on the narrow walk, edged with pointed bricks and
bordered by cowslips and wallflowers, which led through the short garden
to the three stone steps and the tall iron gate. She was a shapeless yet
majestic woman of some fifty years, with a large mottled face in which a
steadfast expression of gentle obstinacy appeared to underly the more
evanescent ripples of thought or of emotion. Her severe black silk gown,
to which she had just changed from her morning dress of alpaca, was
softened under her full double chin by a knot of lace and a cameo brooch
bearing the helmeted profile of Pallas Athene. On her head she wore a
three-cornered cap trimmed with a ruching of organdie, and beneath it
her thin gray hair still showed a gleam of faded yellow in the sunlight.
She had never been handsome, but her prodigious size had endowed her
with an impressiveness which had passed in her youth, and among an
indulgent people, for beauty. Only in the last few years had her
fleshiness, due to rich food which she could not resist and to lack of
exercise for which she had an instinctive aversion, begun seriously to
inconvenience her.

Beyond the wire cage, in which the canary spent his involuntarily
celibate life, an ancient microphylla rose-bush, with a single imperfect
bud blooming ahead of summer amid its glossy foliage, clambered over a
green lattice to the gabled pediment of the porch, while the delicate
shadows of the leaves rippled like lace-work on the gravel below. In the
miniature garden, where the small spring blossoms strayed from the prim
beds into the long feathery grasses, there were syringa bushes, a little
overblown; crape-myrtles not yet in bud; a holly tree veiled in bright
green near the iron fence; a flowering almond shrub in late bloom
against the shaded side of the house; and where a west wing put out on
the left, a bower of red and white roses was steeped now in the faint
sunshine. At the foot of the three steps ran the sunken moss-edged
bricks of High Street, and across High Street there floated, like
wind-blown flowers, the figures of Susan Treadwell and Virginia
Pendleton.

Opening the rusty gate, the two girls tripped with carefully held
flounces up the stone steps and between the cowslips and wallflowers
that bordered the walk. Their white lawn dresses were made with the