“I would not tell you of it, Amata.  I wanted you just to see it,” she said.  And Mrs. Argenter admired and thanked, and then lamented their own ill-success in greenhouse and garden culture.

“I am not strong enough to look after it much myself, and Mr. Argenter never has time,” she said; “and our first man was a tipsifier, and the last was a rogue.  He sold off quantities of the best young plants, we found, just before they came to show for anything.”

“Our man has been with us for eight years,” said Rodney Sherrett.  “I dare say he could recommend some one to you, if you liked; and he wouldn’t send anybody that wasn’t right.  Shall I ask him?”

Mrs. Argenter would be delighted if he would; and then Mr. Sherrett must come into the conservatory, where a few ragged palm ferns, their great leaves browning and crumbling at the edges,—­some daphnes struggling into green tips, having lost their last growth of leaf and dropped all their flower buds, and several calmly enduring orange and lemon trees, gave all the suggestion of foliage that the place afforded, and served, much like the painter’s inscription at the bottom of his canvas merely to signify by the scant glimpse through the drawing-room draperies,—­“This is a conservatory.”

Mrs. Argenter asked Rodney something about the best arrangement for the open beds, and wanted to know what would be surest to do well for the rockery, and whether it was in a good part of the house,—­sufficiently shaded?  Meanwhile, Amy and Sylvie were turning over music, and when they all gathered together again the call had extended to a two hours’ visit.

“It is really unpardonable,” Amy Sherrett was saying, and picking up the pretty little hat which she had thrown down upon a chair,—­“it had been so warm to wear anything a minute that one need not.”  And then Mrs. Argenter said so easily and of course, that they “certainly would not think of going now, when it would soon be really pleasant for a twilight drive; tea would be ready early, for she and Sylvie were alone, and all they had cared for to-day had been a cold lunch at one.  They would have it on the north veranda;” and she touched a bell to give the order.

Perhaps Amy Sherrett would hardly have consented, but that Rodney gave her a look, comical in its appeal, over Sylvie’s shoulder, as she stood showing him a great scarlet Euphorbia in a portfolio of water-colors, and said with a beseeching significance,—­

“Consider Red Squirrel, Amy.  He really did have a pretty hard pull; and what with the heat and the flies, I dare say he would take it with more equanimity after sundown,—­since Mrs. Argenter is so very kind.”

And so they stayed; and Mrs. Argenter laid another little brick in her “House that Jack built.”

* * * * *

At this same time,—­how should she know it?—­something very different was going on in one of the rooms of a great hotel in New York.  Somebody else who had meant before now to have left for home, had been delayed till after sundown.  Somebody else would go over the road by dark instead of by daylight.  By dark,—­though there should be broad, beating sunshine over the world again when the journey should be made.