noons stained with blue,--the landscape like a tapestry
woven in delicate grins on a ground of indigo. The arbutus, all aglow and
fragrant beneath its leaves, the purple fringed polygala were past, but
they found the pale gold lily of the bellwort, the rust-red bloom of the
ginger. In the open spaces under the sky were clouds of bluets, wild
violets, and white strawberry flowers clustering beside the star moss all
a-shimmer with new green. The Canada Mayflower spread a carpet under the
pines; and in the hollows where the mists settled, where the brooks
flowed, where the air was heavy with the damp, ineffable odour of growing
things, they gathered drooping adder's-tongues, white-starred bloodroots
and foam-flowers. From Insall's quick eye nothing seemed to escape. He
would point out to them the humming-bird that hovered, a bright blur,
above the columbine, the woodpecker glued to the trunk of a maple high
above their heads, the red gleam of a tanager flashing through sunlit
foliage, the oriole and vireo where they hid. And his was the ear that
first caught the exquisite, distant note of the hermit. Once he stopped
them, startled, to listen to the cock partridge drumming to its mate....

Sometimes, of an evening, when Janet was helping Mrs. Maturin in her
planting or weeding, Insall would join them, rolling up the sleeves of
his flannel shirt and kneeling beside them in the garden paths. Mrs.
Maturin was forever asking his advice, though she did not always follow
it.

"Now, Brooks," she would say, "you've just got to suggest something to
put in that border to replace the hyacinths."

"I had larkspur last year--you remember--and it looked like a chromo in a
railroad folder."

"Let me see--did I advise larkspur?" he would ask.

"Oh, I'm sure you must have--I always do what you tell me. It seems to me
I've thought of every possible flower in the catalogue. You know, too,
only you're so afraid of committing yourself."

Insall's comic spirit, betrayed by his expressions, by the quizzical
intonations of his voice, never failed to fill Janet with joy, while it
was somehow suggestive, too, of the vast fund of his resource. Mrs.
Maturin was right, he could have solved many of her questions offhand if
he had so wished, but he had his own method of dealing with appeals. His
head tilted on one side, apparently in deep thought over the problem, he
never answered outright, but by some process of suggestion unfathomable
to Janet,