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their cousin Lucy Saltonstone's dance,
where no less a person than Roger Brevard had asked her for a
quadrille.
Laurel's thoughts grew so active that she was unable to remain any
longer in bed; she freed herself from the enveloping linen and crossed
the room to a window through which the sun was pouring in a sharp
bright angle. She had never known the world to smell so delightful--it
was one of the notable Mays in which the lilacs blossomed--and she
stood responding with a sparkling life to the brilliant scented morning,
the honey-sweet perfume of the lilacs mingled with the faintly pungent
odor of box wet with dew.
She could see, looking back across a smooth green corner of the
Wibirds' lawn next door, the enclosure of their own back yard, divided
from the garden by a white lattice fence and row of prim grayish
poplars. At the farther wall her grandfather, in a wide palm leaf hat,
was stirring about his pear trees, tapping the ground and poking among
the branches with his ivory headed cane.
Laurel exuberantly performed her morning toilet, half careless, in her
soaring spirits, of the possible effect of numerous small ringings of

pitcher on basin, the clatter of drawers, upon Camilla. Yesterday she
had worn a dress of light wool delaine; but this morning, she decided
largely, summer had practically come; and, on her own authority, she
got an affair of thin pineapple cloth out of the yellow camphorwood
chest. She hurriedly finished weaving her heavy chestnut hair into two
gleaming plaits, fastened a muslin guimpe at the back, and slipped into
her dress. Here, however, she twisted her face into an expression of
annoyance--her years were affronted by the length of pantalets that
hung below her skirt. Such a show of their narrow ruffles might do for
a very small girl, but not for one of eleven; and she caught them up
until only the merest fulled edge was visible. Then she made a buoyant
descent to the lower hall, left the house by a side door to the bricked
walk and an arched gate into the yard, and joined her grandfather.
"Six bells in the morning watch," he announced, consulting a thick gold
timepiece. "Head pump rigged and deck swabbed down?" Secure in her
knowledge of the correct answers for these sudden interrogations
Laurel impatiently replied, "Yes, sir."
"Scuttle butt filled?"
"Yes, sir." She frowned and dug a heel in the soft ground.
"Then splice the keel and heave the galley overboard."
This last she recognized as a sally of humor, and contrived a fleeting
perfunctory smile. Her grandfather turned once more to the pears. "See
the buds on those Ashton Towns," he commented. Laurel gazed
critically: the varnished red buds were bursting with white blossom, the
new leaves unrolling, tender green and sticky. "But the jargonelles--"
he drew in his lips doubtfully. She studied him with the profound
interest his sheer being always invoked: she was absorbed in his
surprising large roundness of body, like an enormous pudding; in the
deliberate care with which he moved and planted his feet; but most of
all by the fact that when he was angry his face got quite purple, the
color of her mother's paletot or a Hamburg grape.
They crossed the yard to where the vines of the latter, and of white

Chasselas--Laurel was familiar with these names from frequent
horticultural questionings--had been laid down in cold frames for later
transplanting; and from them the old man, her palm tightly held in his,
trod ponderously to the currant bushes massed against the closed arcade
of the stables, the wood and coal and store houses, across the rear of the
place.
At last, with frequent disconcerting mutterings and explosive breaths,
he finished his inspection and turned toward the house. Laurel,
conscious of her own superiority of apparel, surveyed her companion in
a frowning attitude exactly caught from her mother. He had on that
mussy suit of yellow Chinese silk, and there was a spot on the
waistcoat straining at its pearl buttons. She wondered, maintaining the
silent mimicry of elder remonstrance, why he would wear those untidy
old things when his chests were heaped with snowy white linen and
English broadcloths. It was very improper in an Ammidon, particularly
in one who had been captain of so many big ships, and in court dress
with a cocked hat met the Emperor of Russia.
They did not retrace Laurel's steps, but passed through a narrow wicket
to the garden that lay directly behind the house. The enclosure was full
of robin-song and pouring sunlight; the lilac trees on either side of the
summer-house against the gallery of the stable were blurred with their
new lavender flowering; the thorned glossy foliage of the hedge of June