“Will you ride back to town with me?” I said.

She accepted the offer of the seat beside me, carefully holding her flowers.

“How odd that grave looks with its marshalled array of hollyhocks!” I said, by way of opening conversation, for she sat there silent.  “What a peculiar taste, to adorn a loved one’s last resting-place in that way!”

She looked up at me silently, and I noticed that her eyes were hollow, and her face sad.  Then she turned toward the graveyard and the tall red hollyhocks standing out so vividly in the sunset glow, and said quietly: 

“It is my mother’s grave.  I planted the hollyhocks upon it.”

She was silent again, looking sadly and tenderly at the flowers in her lap, but presently she went on: 

“I do not mind telling you why I did it.  Perhaps talking about it will lessen the heaviness of my heart.  No one but my sister knows why I planted them there, and she has never seen the grave, nor have I seen her, since our mother died.  When we were young girls at home, our mother loved hollyhocks.  She had the yard filled with great clumps of them.  We were away at school for a few years and when we went home again they quite horrified our advanced, young ladyish taste.  We thought them vulgar, and between ourselves we fretted and scolded about them and declared to each other that they were horrid, and that we were ashamed to have any one visit us while those great, ugly, coarse things filled the yard.  We apologized for them to visitors and said they were mother’s flowers, but we hated them.  And after a while we complained about them to mother and said before her how common and coarse and old-fashioned they were.  And she, dear, gentle soul, said not a word, but looked sadly out at the flowers she loved so well and had cared for so long and so tenderly.  And one day, after we had fretted and worried her a long time about them, she said to us—­I can see yet how she tried to smile and disguise the sadness in her heart—­that we might dig up all the hollyhocks and plant other flowers in their places.  And we did.  It stabs me to the heart now to think of it,—­but we did it joyfully.

“After we were married and went away from home—­my sister to London and I to Chicago—­our mother came here to this town and soon died.  In the sorrow of that time, when first I knew how much and how tenderly I loved her, I remembered about the hollyhocks, and at last realized how brutally thoughtless and unfeeling we had been.  So, in shame and remorse, I did the one little thing that was all I could do, and covered the grave of our dear, patient, gentle, saint-like mother with the flowers she loved the best of all, but which we had not let her gladden her life with.  I do not pretend to know whether or not there is a hereafter, or whether there is anything more of her than what lies under those red flowers back there.  But often I wish—­oh, how I wish!—­that it may be so, and that from somewhere her spirit may look down and see and be pleased by the atonement I have tried to make!