What a well-matched couple it was! What a lot they got out of life! Varian walked quietly by the group, to enjoy better the pretty, modish picture they made. Their quick chatter, their bursts of laughter, the sweet faint odor of the tea, the gay dresses and light flannels, with the quiet, sombrely attired servants to add tone, all gave him, fresh from Hunter's quick sense of the effective, an appreciation that gained force from his separateness; he walked farther away to get a different point of view. He was out of any path now, and suddenly, hardly beyond reach of their voices, he found himself in a part of the grounds he had never approached before. A thick high hedge shut in a kind of court at the side and back of the great house, and a solid wooden door, carefully matched to its green, left open by accident, showed a picture so out of line with the succession of vivid scenes that dazzled the visitor at Wilton Bluffs that he stopped involuntarily. The rectangle was carpeted with the characteristic emerald turf of the place, divided by intersecting red brick paths into four regular squares. In the farther corner of each of these a trim green clothes-tree was planted, all abloom with snowy fringed napkins that shone dazzling white against the hedge. One of the squares was a neat little kitchen-garden; parsley was there in plenty, and other vaguely familiar green things, curly-leaved and spear-pointed. A warm gust of wind brought mint to his nostrils. A second plot held a small crab-apple tree covered with pink and orange globes. A great tortoise-shell cat with two kittens ornamented the third, and in the middle of the fourth, beside a small wooden table, a woman sat with her back toward the intruder. On the table were one or two tin boxes and a yellow earthen dish; in her left hand, raised to the shoulder-level, was a tall thin bottle, from which an amber fluid dripped in an almost imperceptibly thin stream; her right arm stirred vigorously. She was a middle-aged woman with lightly grayed hair--a kind of premonitory powdering. Over her full skirt of lavender-striped cotton stuff fell a broad, competent white apron. Except for the thudding of the spoon against the bowl, and a faint, homely echo of clashing china and tin, mingled with occasionally raised voices and laughter from some farther kitchen region, all was utterly, placidly still. Varian stood chained to the open gate. Something in the calm sun-bathed picture tugged strongly at his heart. He thought suddenly of his mother and his Aunt Delia--he had been very fond of Aunt Delia. And what cookies she used to make! Molasses cookies, brown, moist, and crumbly, they had sweetened his boyhood.