beyond which nodded the heads of Angy's carefully tended, out-door
"children"--her roses, her snowballs, her sweet-smelling syringas, her
wax-like bleeding-hearts, and her shrub of bridal-wreath.

"Jest a minute," she murmured, as Abe would have hastened on to the
gate. She bent her proud head and kissed with furtive, half-ashamed
passion a fluffy white spray of the bridal-wreath. Now overtopping the
husband's silk hat, the shrub had not come so high as his knee when they
two had planted it nearly a half-century ago.

"You're mine!" Angy's heart cried out to the shrub and to every growing
thing in the garden. "You're mine. I planted you, tended you, loved you
into growing. You're all the children I ever had, and I'm leaving you."

But the old wife did not pluck a single flower, for she could never
bear to see a blossom wither in her hand, while all she said aloud was:
"I'm glad 't was Mis' Holmes that bought in the house. They say she's a
great hand ter dig in the garden."

Angy's voice faltered. Abe did not answer. Something had caused a
swimming before his eyes which he did not wish his wife to see; so he
let fall the handle of the express-wagon and, bending his slow back,
plucked a sprig of "old-man." Though he could not have expressed his
sentiments in words, the garden brought poignant recollections of the
hopes and promises which had thrown their rose color about the young
days of his marriage. His hopes had never blossomed into fulfilment.
His promises to the little wife had been choked by the weeds of his own
inefficiency. Worse than this, the bursting into bloom of seeds of
selfish recklessness in himself was what had turned the garden of their
life into an arid waste. And now, in their dry and withered old age, he