as they approached
her.

Mrs. Talcott raised herself slowly and turned to them, drawing off her
gardening gloves. She was a funny looking old woman, funnier than Karen
had prepared him for finding her, and uglier. Her large face,
wallet-shaped and sallow, was scattered over with white moles, or
rather, warts, one of which, on her eyelid, caused it to droop over her
eye and to blink sometimes, suddenly. She had a short, indefinite nose
and long, large lips firmly folded. With its updrawn hair and
impassivity her face recalled that of a Chinese image; but more than of
anything else she gave Gregory the impression, vaguely and incongruously
tragic, of an old shipwrecked piece of oaken timber, washed up, finally,
out of reach of the waves, on some high, lonely beach; battered, though
still so solid; salted through and through; crusted with brine, and with
odd, bleached excrescences, like barnacles, adhering to it. Her look of
almost inhuman cleanliness added force to the simile.

"Mr. Jardine heard Tante last winter, you know," said Karen, "and met
her at Mrs. Forrester's."

"I'm very happy to make your acquaintance, Sir," said Mrs. Talcott,
giving Gregory her hand.

"Mrs. Talcott is a great gardener," Karen went on. "Tante has the ideas
and Mrs. Talcott carries them out. And sometimes they aren't easy to
carry out, are they, Mrs. Talcott!"

Mrs. Talcott, her hands folded at her waist, contemplated her work.

"Mitchell made a mistake about the campanulas, Karen," she remarked.
"He's put the clump of blue over yonder, instead of the white."

"Oh, Mrs. Talcott!" Karen turned to look. "And Tante specially wanted
the white there so that they should be against the sea. How very stupid
of Mitchell."

"They'll have to come out, I presume," said Mrs. Talcott, but without
emotion.

"And where is the _pyramidalis alba_?"

"Well, he's got that up in the flagged garden where she wanted the
blue," said Mrs. Talcott.

"And it will be so bad for them to move them again! What a pity! They
have been sent for specially," Karen explained to Gregory. "My guardian
heard of a particularly beautiful kind, and the white were to be for
this corner of the wall, you see that they would look very lovely
against the sea, and the blue were to be among the white veronica and
white lupins in the flagged garden. And now they are all planted wrong,
and so accurately and solidly wrong," she walked ahead of Mrs. Talcott
examining the offending