"Yes, sir." She frowned and dug a heel in the soft ground.

"Then splice the keel and heave the galley overboard."

This last she recognized as a sally of humor, and contrived a fleeting
perfunctory smile. Her grandfather turned once more to the pears. "See
the buds on those Ashton Towns," he commented. Laurel gazed critically:
the varnished red buds were bursting with white blossom, the new leaves
unrolling, tender green and sticky. "But the jargonelles--" he drew in
his lips doubtfully. She studied him with the profound interest his sheer
being always invoked: she was absorbed in his surprising large roundness
of body, like an enormous pudding; in the deliberate care with which he
moved and planted his feet; but most of all by the fact that when he was
angry his face got quite purple, the color of her mother's paletot or a
Hamburg grape.

They crossed the yard to where the vines of the latter, and of white
Chasselas--Laurel was familiar with these names from frequent
horticultural questionings--had been laid down in cold frames for later
transplanting; and from them the old man, her palm tightly held in his,
trod ponderously to the currant bushes massed against the closed arcade
of the stables, the wood and coal and store houses, across the rear of
the place.

At last, with frequent disconcerting mutterings and explosive breaths,
he finished his inspection and turned toward the house. Laurel,
conscious of her own superiority of apparel, surveyed her companion in a
frowning attitude exactly caught from her mother. He had on that mussy
suit of yellow Chinese silk, and there was a spot on the waistcoat
straining at its pearl buttons. She wondered, maintaining the silent