Nancy Rogerson sat down on Louisa Shaw’s front doorstep and looked about her, drawing a long breath of delight that seemed with pain. Everything was very much the same; the square garden was a charming hodge-podge of fruit and flowers, and goose-berry bushes and tiger lilies, a gnarled old apple tree sticking up here and there, and a thick cherry copse at the foot. Behind was a row of firs, coming out darkly against the swimming pink sunset sky, not looking a day older than they had looked twenty years ago, when Nancy had been a young girl walking and dreaming in their shadows. The old to the left was as big and and, Nancy thought with a little , probably as caterpillary, as ever. Nancy had learned many things in her twenty years of exile from Avonlea, but she had never learned to conquer her of .
“Nothing is much changed, Louisa,” she said, her chin on her plump white hands, and at the odour of the mint upon which Louisa was . “I’m glad; I was afraid to come back for fear you would have improved the old garden out of existence, or else into some , orderly lawn, which would have been worse. It’s as magnificently untidy as ever, and the fence still wobbles. It CAN’T be the same fence, but it looks exactly like it. No, nothing is much changed. Thank you, Louisa.”
Louisa had not the faintest idea what Nancy was thanking her for, but then she had never been able to Nancy, much as she had always liked her in the old girlhood days that now seemed much further away to Louisa than they did to Nancy. Louisa was separated from them by the fulness of wifehood and motherhood, while Nancy looked back only over the narrow gap that empty years make.
“You haven’t changed much yourself, Nancy,” she said, looking admiringly at Nancy’s trim figure, in the nurse’s uniform she had donned to show Louisa what it was like, her firm, pink-and-white face and the the waves of her golden brown hair. “You’ve held your own wonderfully well.”
“Haven’t I?” said Nancy . “Modern methods of and cold cream have kept away the crowsfeet, and fortunately I had the Rogerson to start with. You wouldn’t think I was really thirty-eight, would you? Thirty-eight! Twenty years ago I thought anybody who was thirty-eight was a perfect female Methuselah. And now I feel so horribly, ridiculously young, Louisa. Every morning when I get up I have to say solemnly to myself three times, ‘You’re an old maid, Nancy Rogerson,’ to tone myself down to anything like a becoming attitude for the day.”
“I guess you don’t mind being an old maid much,” said Louisa, shrugging her shoulders. She would not have been an old maid herself for anything; yet she inconsistently envied Nancy her freedom, her wide life in the world, her unlined brow, and care-free lightness of spirit.
“Oh, but I do mind,” said Nancy . “I hate being an old maid.”
“Why don’t you get married, then?” asked Louisa, paying an unconscious tribute to Nancy’s chance by her use of the present tense.
Nancy shook her head.
“No, that wouldn’t suit me either. I don’t want to be married. Do you remember that story Anne Shirley used to tell long ago of the pupil who wanted to be a widow because ‘if you were married your husband bossed you and if you weren’t married people called you an old maid?’ Well, that is my opinion. I’d like to be a widow. Then I’d have the freedom of the unmarried, with the of the married. I could eat my cake and have it, too. Oh, to be a widow!”
“Nancy!” said Louisa in a shocked tone.
Nancy laughed, a gurgle that through the garden like a .
“Oh, Louisa, I can shock you yet. That was just how you used to say ‘Nancy’ long ago, as if I’d broken all the commandments at once.”
“You do say such queer things,” protested Louisa, “and half the time I don’t know what you mean.”
“Bless you, dear coz, half the time I don’t myself. Perhaps the joy of coming back to the old spot has slightly turned my brain, I’ve found my lost girlhood here. I’m NOT thirty-eight in this garden—it is a flat impossibility. I’m sweet eighteen, with a waist line two inches smaller. Look, the sun is just setting. I see he has still his old trick of throwing his last beams over the Wright . By the way, Louisa, is Peter Wright still living there?”
“Yes.” Louisa threw a sudden interested glance at the Nancy.
“Married, I suppose, with half a dozen children?” said Nancy indifferently, pulling up some more sprigs of mint and pinning them on her breast. Perhaps the of leaning over to do it flushed her face. There was more than the Rogerson colour in it, anyhow, and Louisa, slow though her mental processes might be in some respects, thought she understood the meaning of a blush as well as the next one. All the instinct of the matchmaker flamed up in her.
“Indeed he isn’t,” she said . “Peter Wright has never married. He has been faithful to your memory, Nancy.”
“Ugh! You make me feel as if I were buried up there in the Avonlea and had a monument over me with a weeping willow carved on it,” shivered Nancy. “When it is said that a man has been faithful to a woman’s memory it generally means that he couldn’t get anyone else to take him.”
“That isn’t the case with Peter,” protested Louisa. “He is a good match, and many a woman would have been glad to take him, and would yet. He’s only forty-three. But he’s never taken the slightest interest in anyone since you threw him over, Nancy.”
“But I didn’t. He threw me over,” said Nancy, , looking afar over the low-lying fields and a feathery young spruce valley to the white buildings of the Wright farm, glowing in the sunset light when all the rest of Avonlea was scarfing itself in shadows. There was laughter in her eyes. Louisa could not pierce beneath that laughter to find if there were anything under it.
“Fudge!” said Louisa. “What on earth did you and Peter quarrel about?” she added, .
“I’ve often wondered,” parried Nancy.
“And you’ve never seen him since?” reflected Louisa.
“No. Has he changed much?”
“Well, some. He is gray and kind of tired-looking. But it isn’t to be wondered at—living the life he does. He hasn’t had a for two years—not since his old aunt died. He just lives there alone and cooks his own meals. I’ve never been in the house, but folks say the is something awful.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t think Peter was cut out for a tidy housekeeper,” said Nancy lightly, dragging up more mint. “Just think, Louisa, if it hadn’t been for that old quarrel I might be Mrs. Peter Wright at this very moment, mother to the aforesaid supposed half dozen, and my soul over Peter’s meals and socks and cows.”
“I guess you are better off as you are,” said Louisa.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Nancy looked up at the white house on the hill again. “I have an good time out of life, but it doesn’t seem to satisfy, somehow. To be candid—and oh, Louisa, candour is a rare thing among women when it comes to talking of the men—I believe I’d rather be cooking Peter’s meals and dusting his house. I wouldn’t mind his bad grammar now. I’ve learned one or two valuable little things out yonder, and one is that it doesn’t matter if a man’s grammar is , so long as he doesn’t swear at you. By the way, is Peter as ungrammatical as ever?”
“I—I don’t know,” said Louisa helplessly. “I never knew he WAS ungrammatical.”
“Does he still say, ‘I seen,’ and ‘them things’?” demanded Nancy.
“I never noticed,” confessed Louisa.
“Enviable Louisa! Would that I had been born with that blessed of never noticing! It stands a woman in better stead than beauty or brains. I used to notice Peter’s mistakes. When he said ‘I seen,’ it jarred on me in my salad days. I tried, oh, so tactfully, to reform him in that respect. Peter didn’t like being reformed—the Wrights always had a fairly good opinion of themselves, you know. It was really over a question of syntax we quarrelled. Peter told me I’d have to take him as he was, grammar and all, or go without him. I went without him—and ever since I’ve been wondering if I were really sorry, or if it were merely a pleasantly regret I was hugging to my heart. I daresay it’s the latter. Now, Louisa, I see the beginning of the plot far down in those placid eyes of yours. Strangle it at birth, dear Louisa. There is no use in your trying to make up a match between Peter and me now—no, nor in slyly him up here to tea some evening, as you are even this moment thinking of doing.”
“Well, I must go and milk the cows,” Louisa, rather glad to make her escape. Nancy’s power of thought-reading struck her as uncanny. She felt afraid to remain with her cousin any longer, lest Nancy should drag to light all the secrets of her being.
Nancy sat long on the steps after Louisa had gone—sat until the night came down, darkly and sweetly, over the garden, and the stars twinkled out above the firs. This had been her home in girlhood. Here she had lived and kept house for her father. When he died, Curtis Shaw, newly married to her cousin Louisa, bought the farm from her and moved in. Nancy stayed on with them, expecting soon to go to a home of her own. She and Peter Wright were engaged.
Then came their mysterious quarrel, concerning the cause of which kith and on both sides were left in annoying ignorance. Of the results they were not ignorant. Nancy promptly packed up and left Avonlea seven hundred miles behind her. She went to a hospital in Montreal and studied nursing. In the twenty years that followed she had never even revisited Avonlea. Her sudden descent on it this summer was a born of a moment’s homesick for this same old garden. She had not thought about Peter. In very truth, she had thought little about Peter for the last fifteen years. She supposed that she had forgotten him. But now, sitting on the old doorstep, where she had often sat in her courting days, with Peter lounging on a broad stone at her feet, something at her heartstrings. She looked over the valley to the light in the kitchen of the Wright farmhouse, and pictured Peter sitting there, lonely and uncared for, with but the cold comfort of his own providing.
“Well, he should have got married,” she said snappishly. “I am not going to worry because he is a lonely old bachelor when all these years I have supposed him a comfy Benedict. Why doesn’t he hire him a housekeeper, at least? He can afford it; the place looks prosperous. Ugh! I’ve a fat bank account, and I’ve seen almost everything in the world worth seeing; but I’ve got several ca............