"You do wonderfully, wonderfully!" she assented; "and you deserve great
credit. Many deaf people are irritable--and you are so cheerful!"

He smiled as pleasantly as if he had heard the compliment and passed her
a small pad from his blouse pocket. With the pencil attached to it by a
string she wrote her instructions slowly, in an old-fashioned hand,
dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's.

"Pardon me, madam, but Miss Galland"--he paused, dwelling with a slight
inflection on his mention of the daughter as the talisman that warranted
his presuming to disagree with the mother--"Miss Galland, when she took
her last look around before going, said: 'Please don't cut any yet. I
want to see them all abloom in their beds first.'"

"She has taken such an interest in them, and my idea was to please her.
Of course, leave them," said Mrs. Galland. She made repeated vigorous
nods of assent to save herself the trouble of writing. Starting back up
the steps, she murmured: "I suppose cut flowers are out of fashion--I
know I am--and deaf gardeners are in." She sighed. "And you are
twenty-seven, Marta, twenty-seven!" She drew another, a very long sigh,
and then her serenity returned.

"Ours did not pass theirs," observed the gardener, with a musing smile
when he was alone; "but theirs nearly had a jolly spill there at the
turn!"

As he bent once more to his work a bumblebee approached on its glad,
piratical errand from flower to flower in the rapt stillness, and Feller
looked around with a slight courtesy of his hat brim.