R.
H.D.had never seen our Japanese iris so beautiful; as for his, they wouldn't grow at all.

It wasn't the iris, it was the man behind the iris.

And then back he would come to us, with a wonderful story of his adventures in the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and leaving behind him a cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of life, and a gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the Actinidia vines.
It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways.
Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very difficult and complicated.

And he who had given so much friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where there were children.

Before he came that first year our house had no name.