A feeling of pleasure, quick, involuntary, passed through his mind;
pleasure in the thought of what these flowers meant to the owner of them.
He had a vision of a tall and slender woman, no longer young, with a
delicate and plaintive face, moving among the rose-beds she loved, her
light dress trailing on the grass. The recollection stirred in him
affection, and an impulse of sympathy, stronger than the mere thought of
the flowers, and the woman's tending of them, could explain. It passed
indeed immediately into something else--a touch of new and sharp anxiety.

"And she's been very peaceful of late," he said to himself ruefully, "as
far at least as Hester ever lets her be. Preston's wife was a godsend.
Perhaps now she'll come out of her shell and go more among the people. It
would help her. Anyway, we can't have everything rooted up again just
yet--before the time."

He walked on, and as the farther corner of the house came into view, he
saw a thinly curtained window with a light inside it, and it seemed to
him that he distinguished a figure within.

"Reading?--or embroidering? Probably, at her work. She had that
commission to finish. Busy woman!"

He fell to imagining the little room, the embroidery frame, the books,
and the brindled cat on the rug, of no particular race or beauty; for use
not for show; but sensitive and gentle like its mistress, and like her,
not to be readily made friends with.

"How wise of her," he thought, "not to accept her sister's offer since
Ralph's death--to insist on keeping her little house and her
independence. Imagine her!--prisoned in that house, with that family.