The Prisoner

								

her by her dancing pupils that he got hold of his inquisitorial outfit.
"I don't know," said Denny, "as I know you folks. Do you come from round
here?"
Lydia smiled at him pleasantly.
"Good night," said she. "Get the freight round in the morning, won't
you? and be sure you bring somebody to help open the crates."
Then Denny climbed sorrowfully up on his box, and when he looked round
he found them staring there as they had stared at the station: only now
he saw they were in a row and "holding hands".
"I think," said Lydia, in rather a hushed voice, as if she told the
others a pretty secret, "it's a very beautiful place."
"You girls haven't been here, have you?" asked the colonel.
"No," said Anne, "you'd just let it when we came to live with you."
Both girls used that delicate shading of their adoptive tie with him.
They and their mother, now these three years dead, had "come to live
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