Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/66

 coreopsis, and sweet-peas, white, violet, salmon, deep purple, and striated. Now she cut pinks and verbenas, phlox, pansies, and nasturtiums. How good it was to be among these nice old-fashioned flowers again. She recalled how she and Tony had once stopped the carriage to gather blossoms from the red cliffs overhanging the Mediterranean, and almost as quickly she tried to blot this memory from her mind. A shadow passed across her face as she sensed another omen of evil: three crows, blue-black as ravens, with raucous caws, sailed high over her head and disappeared.

Aren't you tired? Lou, now beating up the whites of eggs for an angel-cake, called out from the window.

Not a bit, Ella replied, but tell me when you have enough.

O, we can use every flower in the garden, but Anna can finish cutting them when you are tired.

That afternoon when Ella, dressed in a becoming gown of ecru muslin, a half-dozen gleaming stars and butterflies and leaves and insects decorating her ample bosom, great ivory-white pearls in her ears, descended the stairs, she discovered to what use the flowers had been put. They obscured the rooms, most of them disposed in cut-glass vases and pitchers, on tables, bookcases, mantelpieces, wherever there was a flat surface; a few of the larger vessels, banked high with blossoms and sword-ferns, stood