Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/111



Gareth Johns lived on Oakdale Avenue in a large, frame house, which had been erected about 1890 in the best provincial style of that period, and at present was painted a dull buff, with green blinds. This house was set well back on a lawn which sloped down towards the cement side-walk. Following a design of the town two small rectangular parks separated the side-walk from the kerb. These were divided by a walk which ran from the porch, straight across the public side-walk, to the street. In these parks, which recurred in front of every house on Oakdale Avenue and all the other streets and avenues in Maple Valley, trees had been set out at regular intervals. The trees on this particular avenue were for the most part box-elders and cottonwoods, the first of which, a little later in the season, would litter the lawns with a myriad of seeds, about the size and appearance of grasshoppers, the second of which would whiten the ground with cotton-filament. On the lawn itself grew lilac and syringa bushes, which had done their blooming a month earlier. On either side of the house was a flower-bed in the shape of a crescent. One of these was a bed of coleus, harmoniously mottled plants, the leaves shading