‘The book,’ said Miss Peckitt, ‘was mine when a child, and my dear mother also, as a young girl, was partial to it. Please accept it, Miss, with my humble best wishes.’
‘Thanks most awfully,’ said Caroline, embracing her.
‘Thank you,’ said Miss Peckitt, straightening her collar after the sudden kiss. ‘Quite welcome, though unexpected; I _had_ a bit of southernwood given to me this morning, which, you will find in the book, means a surprise.’
And it did, for the book was _The Language of Flowers_. And really that book was the beginning of this story, or, at least, if it wasn’t that book, it was the other book. But that comes later.
‘It’s ripping,’ said Caroline. ‘I do like it being red.’
The last present was a very large bunch of marigolds and a halfpenny birthday-card, with a gold anchor and pink clasped hands on it, from the boy who did the boots and knives.
‘We’ll decorate our room,’ said Charlotte, ‘in honour of your birthday, Caro. We’ve got lots of coloured things, and I’ll borrow cook’s Sunday scarf. It’s pink and purple shot silk—a perfect dream! I’ll fly!’
She flew; and on her return they decorated their room.
You will perhaps wonder why they were so anxious to decorate their room with coloured things. It was because the house they lived in had so little colour in it that it was more like a print of a house in a book—all black and white and grey, you know—than like a house for real people to live in. It was a pale, neat, chilly house. There was, for instance, white straw matting on the floors instead of warm, coloured carpets; and on the stairs a sort of pale grey cocoa-nut matting. The window curtains were of soft cotton, and were palely lavender; they had no damask richness, no gay flowery patterns. The walls were not papered, but distempered in clean pale tints, and the general effect was rather like that of a very superior private hospital. The fact that the floors were washed every week with Sanitas gave a pleasing wood-yard scent. There were no coloured pictures in the house—only brown copies of great paintings by Raphael and Velazquez and people like that.
The Stanmore children lived here because their father and mother were in India and their other relations in New Zealand—all except old Uncle Charles, who was their mother’s uncle and who had quarrelled with, or been quarrelled with by, their father and mother in bygone years.