helplessly outgrown her maiden heart, in the place of all the loves
of life which she had missed. Her affections had forced an outlet in
roses; they exhaled sweetness in pinks, and twined and clung in
honeysuckle-vines. The daffodils, when they came up in the spring,
comforted her like the smiles of children; when she saw the first
rose, her heart leaped as at the face of a lover.

She had lost the one way of human affection, but her feet had found a
little single side-track of love, which gave her still a zest in the
journey of life. Even in the winter Evelina had her flowers, for she
kept those that would bear transplanting in pots, and all the sunny
windows in her house were gay with them. She would also not let a
rose leaf fall and waste in the garden soil, or a sprig of lavender
or thyme. She gathered them all, and stored them away in chests and
drawers and old china bowls--the whole house seemed laid away in rose
leaves and lavender. Evelina's clothes gave out at every motion that
fragrance of dead flowers which is like the fragrance of the past,
and has a sweetness like that of sweet memories. Even the cedar chest
where Evelina's mother's blue bridal array was stored had its till
heaped with rose leaves and lavender.

When Evelina was nearly seventy years old the old nurse who had lived
with her her whole life died. People wondered then what she would do.
"She can't live all alone in that great house," they said. But she
did live there alone six months, until spring, and people used to
watch her evening lamp when it was put out, and the morning smoke
from her kitchen chimney. "It ain't safe for her to be there alone in
that great house," they said.

But early in April a young girl appeared one Sunday in the old