"Jim!" called Mrs. Marshall, as the old man, carrying a basket in one hand and a spade in the other, was trudging steadily by. His blue overalls and jumper were threadbare under the soft brown they had achieved through his strenuous kneeling and the general intimacy of weeds and sod. He had a curious neutrality of expression—perhaps an indifference to what his blue eyes fell upon, save when they looked out from under their rugged brows at the growing things he tended. Then the lines about them multiplied and deepened, and his face took on new life.

Mrs. Marshall, the large lady at the gate, splendidly starched in her afternoon calico, regarded him without personal interest. He was merely an old resident likely to clear up a matter that had been blurred during her years of absence in the West. Jim\'s eyes traveled past her to the garden in the rear of the house, where yellow flower-de-luce was beginning to blow.

"They\'d ought to put some muck on them pinies last fall," said he, in a soft voice which his gnarled aspect had not foretold.

"Now you stop thinkin\' gardins for a minute [193]an\' pay some heed to me," said Mrs. Marshall. "How was I goin\' to look out for the pinies, when I only come into the property this spring? Uncle\'d ha\' seen \'em mowed down for fodder before he\'d ha\' let you or anybody else poke round over anything \'twas his. But what I want to know is—what was \'t the Miller twins had their quarrel about, all them years ago?"

Jim answered without hesitation or interest: "\'Twas about a man. They both on \'em set by one man, an\' he led \'em on. He made trouble betwixt \'em. \'Twas thirty year ago an\' more."

"An\' they ain\'t spoke sence! My! what fools anybody can make of themselves over a man! He\'s dead now, ain\'t he?"

"I dunno," said Jim. Abstraction had settled upon him. "Say, Mis\' Marshall, what if I should drop in an\' \'tend to them pinies?"

"Fush on the pinies!" said Mrs. Marshall heartily. "You can, if \'t\'ll be any comfort to ye. \'Twas they that made me think o\' the Miller twins. Husband never got over talkin\' about their pinies. I\'d ruther have a good head o\' lettuce than all the pinies that ever blowed."

Jim dropped his traps, opened the gate, walked past her without a word, and began a professional examination of the garden-beds. When he came to a neglected line of box, he made a [194]sympathetic clucking of the tongue, and before a rosebush, coming out in meagre leafage, he stayed a long time.

"Too bad!" he said, as if the bush appealed to him for comfort. "Too bad!"

Mrs. Marshall had gone contentedly back to her sewing by the window, and a cautious voice challenged her from the bedroom, where her daughter, Lily, was changing her dress.

"Well," said Lily, "I guess you\'ve done it this time. Didn\'t you know \'twas Jim\'s wife the man run off with? Well, it was."

Mrs. Marshall paused in her work.

"Well," said she, "I don\'t know whether to laugh or cry. I believe husband did use to say so. I ain\'t thought of it for years. How\'d you find out so much?"

"I guess I don\'t have to be in a place long without hearin\' all there is to hear," said Lily, coming out in her crisp pink muslin. "Here, you hook me up. Why, mother, he\'s Wilfred\'s own uncle! Wilfred told me. He said his uncle never\'d been the same man since his wife run away."

Jim was wandering back to the road, deflected now and then by some starveling plant.

"Anything you want to do," called Mrs. Marshall, with a compensatory impulse, "you\'re welcome to. I may put in a few seeds."

[195]Jim stood there, shaking his head in great dissatisfaction.

"It wouldn\'t ha\' done a mite o\' good for me to come here while he was alive," he said, as if he accounted to himself for that grievous lapse. "He\'d ha\' turned me out, neck an\' crop, if I\'d laid a finger on it."

"Well, you come when you can," said Mrs. Marshall. She was benevolently willing to fall in with Gardener Jim\'s peculiarities, because, being love-cracked, he had no particular occupation save this self-chosen one. "What you s\'pose I said to the new minister about you, Jim?" she continued kindly.

"Dunno," returned Jim, in his soft voice. "Dunno."

"Well, he says to me, \'I never see such a lot o\' nice gardins as there is round here.\' \'Don\'t you know the reason?\' says I. \'Why, Gardener Jim goes round an\' takes care of \'em without money an\' without price.\' Wake up, Jim. That\'s what I said."

The look of response had vanished from his face. He had taken a knife from his pocket and was clipping a dead branch from the prairie queen at the window. When the deed had been done with great nicety, he closed the knife, returned it to his pocket, and took his way silently out of the yard. Mrs. Marshall, glancing up [196]from her sewing, saw him again trudging toward his lonely home.

When Jim went along like that, his head bent and his eyes fixed upon the ground, people often wondered whether he was thinking of anything at all, or whether such intentness did betoken a grave preoccupation. Sometimes they tested him. "What you thinkin\' about, Jim?" one would ask him, when they met upon the road; but Jim never replied in any illuminating way. If he answered at all, it was only to query, "How\'s your gardin?" and then, as soon as the response was given, to nod and hurry on again. If the garden was reported as not doing very well, Jim was there next morning, like the family doctor.

To-day, when he reached the cross-road leading to his little black house, he paused a moment, as if he were working out something and must wait for the answer. Then he continued on the way he had been going, and a quarter of a mile farther on stopped before a great house of a dull and time-worn yellow, where, in the corresponding front window of the upper chambers, two women sat, each in her own solitary state, binding shoes. These were the Miller twins. Sophy saw him as he opened the side gate and went along her path to the back of the house. She rose, tossed her work on the table, and ran [197]into an overlooking chamber to watch him. Sophy had been the pretty one of the family. Now her fair face had broadened, her blond hair showed a wide track at the parting, and her mouth dropped at the corners; but her faded blue eyes still looked wistfully through their glasses. They had a grave simplicity, like that of a child.

As she watched Gardener Jim, a frown came upon her forehead. "What under heavens?" she muttered; and then she saw. Jim was examining her neglected garden, and the wonder was not in that. It was that after all these years, when he had worked for other people, suddenly he had come to her. A moment after, he looked up, to find her at his elbow.

"I should think anybody\'d be ashamed," said he, "to let things go to wrack an\' ruin this way." The paths were thick with weeds. Faithful sweet-william and phlox had evidently struggled for years and barely held their own against misfortune, and bouncing-bet was thrifty. But others of the loved in old-time gardens had starved and died. "You used to have the handsomest canterbury-bells anywhere round," said Jim. He spoke seriously, as if it pained him to find things at such a pass. "Don\'t look as if you\'d sowed a seed sence nobody knows when. Where\'s your pinies?"

[198]Sophy turned toward the high board-fence that ran from the exact middle of the house down through the garden.

"Over there," she said.

"Over where?"

"In her part."

"Her part o\' the place? What you been an\' cut it up this way for?"

If Gardener Jim had ever heard of the feud that separated the two sisters he had apparently forgotten it, and Sophy, knowing his reputed state, felt no surprise.

"She lives in t\'other part o\' the house," she vouchsafed cautiously.

"Well," he grumbled, "that\'s no reason, as I see, why you should ha\' gone an\' sliced up the gardin." He gave one more estimating look at the forlorn waste. "Well, I\'ll be over in the mornin\'."

"You needn\'t," Sophy called after him. "I don\'t want any gardenin\' done," she cried the louder; but Jim paid no attention.

He was at the other gate now, leading into Eliza\'s grounds, and there he found Eliza waiting for him. She looked older than her sister. She was thinner, her eyes were sharp, and her chin was square and firm.

"Well," said she, "what is it?"

Jim hardly seemed to see her.

[199]"Where\'s your pinies?" he asked.

Eliza resolutely refrained from looking at the grassy plot where they sat in their neglected state.

"I dunno \'s they\'re comin\' up this year," she returned speciously.

"Yes, they be, too," said Jim, with vigor. He had gone straight over to the spot where the juicy red-brown stalks were pushing up among the grass. "Well, if I don\'t git round this fall an\' feed up them pinies I sha\'n\'t have a wink o\' sleep all winter."

Eliza had followed him, and now she stood regarding the peonies absently and with almost a wistful curiosity, as if they recalled something she had long forgotten to enjoy.

"I ain\'t done much in the gardin for a good many year," she said. "I got kinder stiff, an\' then I give it up. It\'s too late to do anything to \'em now, I s\'pose?"

"No, it ain\'t neither," said Jim. "I\'ll be round to-morrer an\' git the grass out an\' put suthin\' on to make \'em grow. Trouble is, \'tain\'t so easy to do it in spring as \'tis in the fall, them stalks are so brittle. Don\'t you touch \'em, now. I\'ll see to \'em myself."

Eliza followed him to the gate. She was curious, and yet she hardly knew how to put her question with the indifference she sought. As [200]he was taking up his spade, she found the words:—

"What\'s started you up to come here arter so many years?"

His eyes dropped. The shaggy brows met over them in a defense.

"I kinder thought I would," said he. Then he went soberly back to his own house.

Jim had no garden. Years ago, when his wife had left him, to run away with another man, he had tried to wipe out every sign of his life with her. It was in the early spring of the year when it happened, and the first thing he did, after he came back from the field and found her letter, was to drive the oxen into the home-plot and plough up the garden she had loved. The next day he had harrowed it and sown it down to grass, and then had taken to his bed, where the neighbors found him, and, one and another, nursed him through his fever. When he got up again, he was not entirely the same, but he went about his work, making shoes in the winter and in summer going from house to house to tend the gardens. At first the neighbors had deprecated his spending so much unrewarded time, or even forcing them to resuscitate old gardens against their will; but they had been obliged to yield. He continued his task with a gentle persistency, and the little town became resplendent [201]in gardens—great tangles of cherished growth, or little thrifty squares like patchwork quilts. Jim was not particular as to color and effect. He was only determined that every plant should prosper. Only the Miller sisters he had neglected until to-day, and nobody knew whether he remembered that it was at their house the man had stayed, charming hearts, before he went away again upon his travels, taking the prettiest woman of all with him, or whether it was merely connected with a vague discomfort in his mind.

To-night Jim went into his kitchen and cooked his supper with all a woman\'s deftness. His kitchen was always clean, though, to the end of keeping it so, he had discarded one thing or another, not imperatively needed. One day he had made a collection of articles only used in a less primitive housekeeping, from nutmeg-grater to fluting-iron, and tossed them out of the window into a corner of the yard. There they stayed, while he added to them a footstool, a crib, and a mixed list of superfluities; then some of the poorer inhabitants of the town, known as "Frenchies," discovered that such treasure was there, and grew into the habit of stealing into the yard twice a week or so and, unmolested, taking away the plunder.

To-night Jim determined to go to bed early. He had more to do next day than could possibly [202]be done. As he sat on the front steps, having his after-supper smoke, he heard the beat of hoofs, and looked up to see Wilfred whirling by. Lily Marshall sat beside him, all color and radiance, in her youthful bloom. As Wilfred looked over at him, with a nod, Jim threw out his arm in a wild beckoning.

"Here!" he called. "Here, you stop a minute!"

Wilfred drew up at the gate, and Jim hurried down to them.

"Which way you goin\'?" he called, while Lily looked at him curiously and Wilfred reddened with shame. He was sorry that this new girl come into town must see for herself how queer his uncle was.

"Oh, \'most anywheres!" he answered bluffly. "We\'re just takin\' a ride."

"Well, you go down over Alewife Bridge, then, an\' cast a look into Annie Darling\'s gardin. She\'s gone away an\' left it as neat as wax, an\' that gate o\' hern swings open sometimes an\' them \'tarnal ducks\'ll git in. You wait a minute. I\'ll give ye a mite o\' wire I kep\' to twist round the gate." He sought absorbedly in his pocket and pulled out a little coil. "There!" said he, "that\'s the talk."

Wilfred accepted the wire in silence, and drove along.

[203]"Who\'s Annie Darling?" asked Lily with innocence.

She had not been long in the town without hearing that Wilfred had been "going" with Annie Darling before his sudden invitation to her, that night after prayer-meeting, "May I have the pleasure of seeing you home?" Wilfred himself could not have told why he asked that question when Annie, he knew, was only a pace behind. The one thing he could remember was that, when he saw Lily coming, he realized that he had never in his life known there were cheeks so red and eyes so dark.

"Who is she?" asked Lily, again, tightening her veil. It had been blowing against his cheek.

"Annie Darling?" said Wilfred, with difficulty. "Why, she\'s a girl lives round here. Her mother died last winter, ............