"Well, I don't know how else you'd have them take it," said the doctor. "She's Mrs. Pallinder's mother, and that's all there is to it. But Mrs. Pallinder did say something to me about the old lady being 'queer'--eccentric, as she put it. That's like charity--it covers a multitude of strange doings." "Yes, 'queer' accounts for a good deal," said Gwynne, his face sobering. Doctor Vardaman looked at him with regretful tenderness. He walked with us as far as the street, and patted Gwynne's shoulder gently as we parted--an unusual display of feeling from the doctor, who was anything but a demonstrative man. CHAPTER FIVE Doctor Vardaman's house was called, in the day when it was built, a Swiss cottage. It was a story and a half high, with a steep-pitched roof, garnished with a kind of scalloped wooden lambrequin pendant from the eaves all around. There were casement-windows with arched tops, and the whole edifice was painted a dark chocolate-brown in accordance, no doubt, with the best Swiss models--at least we never questioned the taste of it. It is possible that the charming and faithful Swiss cottage of to-day may be as much of an offence to the landscape in twenty-five years--so does the old order change, giving place to new. Yet it will always be true that a house derives some curious character from its tenant; the doctor redeemed his cottage; he was the soul of that misbegotten body. It was shabby and down-at-heel, if you like, but it was not bourgeois. There was a charm in his unkempt garden, in the slouching ease of his worn old furniture and carpets, his multitudinous loose-backed books, his dim family portraits in chipped gilt frames. He met all hints at alteration or renewal with an indulgent ridicule. "Fresh paint?" he said. "It would make the house look like a servant-girl dressed for Sunday!" Or: "Better is a horse-hair sofa with brass nails than a plush platform-rocker and veneering therewith!" When the Pallinders moved in, trailing a procession rich as Sheba's past his little iron gate, the doctor viewed it with an indecipherable smile. It was in April, a day of light gusty winds, flashes of sunshine and flashes of rain; and Doctor Vardaman, in his shirt-sleeves, was trowelling amongst his young plants with what he frequently denounced as a frantic and futile energy. "I don't know why I do it," he would say soberly. "Nothing ever grows the better for it; very often nothing grows at all. The Irishman, the negro, the very Chinaman whom for my sins I am constrained to employ about the house, have achieved triumphs in the way of lilies of the valley and young onions that leave me gasping in defeat. They are ignorant, unwashed, dissolute pagans. Ling Chee was a spectre soaked in opium; Erastus absconded with all my clothes, my most cherished razors, and whatever money he could get at--yet they had but to scratch the ground and lo, the desert blossomed like the rose! You may see therein the constant allegory of Vice