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“She is ten years older than you. It is likely she will go before you,” I said.

Abel shook his head and stroked his smart beard. I always suspected that beard of being Abel’s last surviving vanity. It was always so carefully groomed, while I had no evidence that he ever combed his grizzled mop of hair.

“No, Tamzine will outlive me. She’s got the Armstrong heart. I have the Marwood heart–my mother was a Marwood. We don’t live to be old, and we go quick and easy. I’m glad of it. I don’t think I’m a coward, master, but the thought of a lingering death gives me a queer sick feeling of horror. There, I’m not going to say any more about it. I just mentioned it so that some day when you hear that old Abel Armstrong has been found dead, you won’t feel sorry. You’ll remember I wanted it that way. Not that I’m tired of life either. It’s very pleasant, what with my garden and Captain Kidd and the harbour out there. But it’s a trifle monotonous at times and death will be something of a change, master. I’m real curious about it.”

“I hate the thought of death,” I said gloomily.

“Oh, you’re young. The young always do. Death grows friendlier as we grow older. Not that one of us really wants to die, though, master. Tennyson spoke truth when he said that. There’s old Mrs. Warner at the Channel Head. She’s had heaps of trouble all her life, poor soul, and she’s lost almost everyone she cared about. She’s always saying that she’ll be glad when her time comes, and she doesn’t want to live any longer in this vale of tears. But when she takes a sick spell, lord, what a fuss she makes, master! Doctors from town and a trained nurse and enough medicine to kill a dog! Life may be a vale of tears, all right, master, but there are some folks who enjoy weeping, I reckon.”

Summer passed through the garden with her procession of roses and lilies and hollyhocks and golden glow. The golden glow was particularly fine that year. There was a great bank of it at the lower end of the garden, like a huge billow of sunshine. Tamzine revelled in it, but Abel liked more subtly-tinted flowers. There was a certain dark wine-hued hollyhock which was a favourite with him. He would sit for hours looking steadfastly into one of its shallow satin cups. I found him so one afternoon in the hop-vine arbour.

“This colour always has a soothing effect on me,” he explained. “Yellow excites me too much–makes me restless–makes me want to sail ‘beyond the bourne of sunset’. I looked at that surge of golden glow down there today till I got all worked up and thought my life had been an awful failure. I found a dead butterfly and had a little funeral–buried it in the fern corner. And I thought I hadn’t been any more use in the world than that poor little butterfly. Oh, I was woeful, master. Then I got me this hollyhock and sat down here to look at it alone. When a man’s alone, master, he’s most with God–or with the devil. The devil rampaged around me all the time I was looking at that golden glow; but God spoke to me through the hollyhock. And it seemed to me that a man who’s as happy as I am and has got such a garden has made a real success of living.”

“I hope I’ll be able to make as much of a success,” I said sincerely.

“I want you to make a different kind of success, though, master,” said Abel, shaking his head. “I want you to do things–the things I’d have tried to do if I’d had the chance. It’s in you to do them–if you set your teeth and go ahead.”

“I believe I can set my teeth and go ahead now, thanks to you, Mr. Armstrong,” I said. “I was heading straight for failure when I came here last spring; but you’ve changed my course.”