And as for Evelina, she tended the flowers in the elder Evelina’s garden with her poor cousin, whose own love-dreams had been illustrated as it were by the pinks and lilies blooming around them when they had all gone out of her heart, and Thomas Merriam’s half-bold, half-imploring eyes looked up at her out of every flower and stung her heart like bees.  Poor young Evelina feared much lest she had offended Thomas, and yet her own maiden decorum had been offended by him, and she had offended it herself, and she was faint with shame and distress when she thought of it.  How had she been so bold and shameless as to give him that look at the meeting-house? and how had he been so cruel as to accost her afterwards?  She told herself she had done right for the maintenance of her own maiden dignity, and yet she feared lest she had angered him and hurt him.  “Suppose he had been fretted by her coolness?” she thought, and then a great wave of tender pity went over her heart, and she would almost have spoken to him of her own accord.  But then she would reflect how he continued to write such beautiful sermons, and prove so clearly and logically the tenets of the faith; and how could he do that with a mind in distress?  Scarcely could she herself tend the flower-beds as she should, nor set her embroidery stitches finely and evenly, she was so ill at ease.  It must be that Thomas had not given the matter an hour’s worry, since he continued to do his work so faithfully and well.  And then her own heart would be sorer than ever with the belief that his was happy and at rest, although she would chide herself for it.

And yet this young Evelina was a philosopher and an analyst of human nature in a small way, and she got some slight comfort out of a shrewd suspicion that the heart of a man might love and suffer on a somewhat different principle from the heart of a woman.  “It may be,” thought Evelina, sitting idle over her embroidery with far-away blue eyes, “that a man’s heart can always turn a while from love to other things as weighty and serious, although he be just as fond, while a woman’s heart is always fixed one way by loving, and cannot be turned unless it breaks.  And it may be wise,” thought young Evelina, “else how could the state be maintained and governed, battles for independence be fought, and even souls be saved, and the gospel carried to the heathen, if men could not turn from the concerns of their own hearts more easily than women?  Women should be patient,” thought Evelina, “and consider that if they suffer ’t is due to the lot which a wise Providence has given them.”  And yet tears welled up in her earnest blue eyes and fell over her fair cheeks and wet the embroidery—­when the elder Evelina was not looking, as she seldom was.  The elder Evelina was kind to her young cousin, but there were days when she seemed to dwell alone in her own thoughts, apart from the whole world, and she seldom spoke either to Evelina or her old servant-man.