bottle that has some kind of nitroglycerin mixture in it that is going
to blow the iron into steel while it is hot, he hopes. Roxanne knows
it because he showed it to her, and he told her if the cottage ever
got on fire to run and get it and carry it carefully away first before
it could blow up the town. It must never be jolted in any way. She has
a key to the shed that she guards sacredly.

If there is one thing in the world that Lovelace Peyton wants worse
than any other, it is bottles. He takes every one he can find and just
begs for more. He has a place down by the garden wall, behind a
chicken coop, where he makes his mixtures and keeps all the bottles.
He's going to be a famous surgeon and doctor some day if he lives,
which I now think is doubtful.

I was down in my garden on the other side of the wall from him picking
some leaves off the lavender bushes Roxanne's great-grandmother had
planted in that lovely old garden, which is so full of Roxanne's
ancestral flowers that it grieves me to think I have to own them
instead of her. I haven't been letting myself go down there often,
because I was afraid she would suspect how much I wanted her to come
out and talk to me like she did the day of Lovelace Peyton's rooster
excitement; but sometimes I think my dignity ought to let me go and
pick just a little of the lavender, and I go. I went this afternoon,
and I believe God sent me and so does Roxanne.

Suddenly, as I bent over the bushes picking, I heard a wail in
Roxanne's sweet voice and I looked up quick. There she stood in the
back door, as white as a pocket handkerchief, shuddering and pointing
to me to look down at the end of the garden right near me.