The third of Evelina’s servants was the woman who had nursed her mother, and she was naturally subdued and undemonstrative, and rendered still more so by a ceaseless monotony of life.  She never went to meeting, and was seldom seen outside the house.  A passing vision of a long white-capped face at a window was about all the neighbors ever saw of this woman.

So Evelina’s gentle privacy was well guarded by her own household, as by a faithful system of domestic police.  She grew old peacefully behind her green hedge, shielded effectually from all rough bristles of curiosity.  Every new spring her own bloom showed paler beside the new bloom of her flowers, but people could not see it.

Some thirty years after the Squire’s death the man John Darby died; his wife, a year later.  That left Evelina alone with the old woman who had nursed her mother.  She was very old, but not feeble, and quite able to perform the simple household tasks for herself and Evelina.  An old man, who saved himself from the almshouse in such ways, came daily to do the rougher part of the garden-work in John Darby’s stead.  He was aged and decrepit; his muscles seemed able to perform their appointed tasks only through the accumulated inertia of a patiently toilsome life in the same tracks.  Apparently they would have collapsed had he tried to force them to aught else than the holding of the ploughshare, the pulling of weeds, the digging around the roots of flowers, and the planting of seeds.

Every autumn he seemed about to totter to his fall among the fading flowers; every spring it was like Death himself urging on the resurrection; but he lived on year after year, and tended well Evelina’s garden, and the gardens of other maiden-women and widows in the village.  He was taciturn, grubbing among his green beds as silently as a worm, but now and then he warmed a little under a fire of questions concerning Evelina’s garden.  “Never see none sech flowers in nobody’s garden in this town, not sence I knowed ’nough to tell a pink from a piny,” he would mumble.  His speech was thick; his words were all uncouthly slurred; the expression of his whole life had come more through his old knotted hands of labor than through his tongue.  But he would wipe his forehead with his shirt-sleeve and lean a second on his spade, and his face would change at the mention of the garden.  Its wealth of bloom illumined his old mind, and the roses and honeysuckles and pinks seemed for a second to be reflected in his bleared old eyes.

There had never been in the village such a garden as this of Evelina Adams’s.  All the old blooms which had come over the seas with the early colonists, and started as it were their own colony of flora in the new country, flourished there.  The naturalized pinks and phlox and hollyhocks and the rest, changed a little in color and fragrance by the conditions of a new climate and soil, were all in Evelina’s garden, and no one dreamed what