His tiny garden enclosed with the crumbling brick wall had never seemed so beautiful. He picked out one by one the flowers he had planted and tended—the oleander-bush by the house, which, a generation before, had quartered the slave house servants. It was in bloom now, the ground beneath it covered over with salver-shaped white petals. There near it was the bed of pansies—Bernard Dieux, sleeping the long sleep in old St. Louis cemetery this year and a half had given him the cuttings. Over to the left was the Cherokee rose in whose shade he had spent many happy hours, reading a part of the time, more often just sitting and dreaming. Many a day he had sat there or in the cool quietness of the decaying servant house, two-storied, of brick laid between heavy posts, briqueté entre poteaux . Its walls were slowly crumbling these late years and its bricks were covered with greenish mould but the old house was sturdily standing up, despite its years, against all the furies of rain and sun that beat upon it. There Jean had sat in the rickety chair and sucked into his nostrils the faint fragrance of his orange-trees that grew just inside and along the old wall. He loved to rest his eyes grown weary with the printed page on their blackish green foliage that provided so perfect a background for their tiny fruit—little globules of deep yellow gold. But he loved these best when they were shedding their flowers—“a steam of rich distilled perfumes,” Bernard, who was given to quotation of poetry, used to say of the orange-trees.
“Jean! Why don’t you come down?” a strident, querulous voice from below stirred him. Jean hastily quitted the window and shuffled over to the huge and elaborately carved bed.
“Mimi! Mimi! Wake up! Your mother’s in an awful humour this morning! Get up quickly before she comes and gets us both!”
The sleeper stirred, turned over and recommenced her steady breathing. The rays of the sunlight touched her hair as her head rolled to one side. In the shadow it had seemed brown. Before Jean’s eyes it