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Evelina, meanwhile, had taken the bundle of dried grasses out of the broken china vase, and was putting the jonquils in their place with touches that lingered down their smooth stems and blade-like leaves. "Ain't they pretty?" she kept repeating as she gathered the flowers into a starry circle. "Seems as if spring was really here, don't it?" Ann Eliza remembered that it was Mr. Ramy's evening.
The Gardener plants rightly, but we are never satisfied. When sweet herbs are meant for us, we ask for roses, and 't is not every garden in which a rose will bloom. If we could keep it clean of weeds, and make it free of all anger and distrust, there'd be heartsease there instead of thorns." "Heartsease?" asked Evelina, piteously. "I thought there was no more!"
For such women as Evelina, the knights of old did battle, and men of other centuries fought with their own temptations and weaknesses. It was such as she who led men to the heights, and pointed them to heights yet farther on. Insensibly, he compared Ralph's mother with Evelina. The two women stood as far apart as a little, meaningless song stands from a great symphony.
This young Evelina, by the fine dignity which had been born with her and not acquired by precept and example, by the sweetly formal diction which seemed her native tongue, had filled him with awe. Now, when he thought she was angered with him, he felt beneath her lady feet, his nostrils choked with a spiritual dust of humiliation. He went forward blindly.
Miss Evelina cowered behind her shielding shutters, for she guessed that he had found the empty vial which had contained laudanum. The Piper sniffed twice at the bottle. His scent was as keen as a hunting dog's. Then he glanced quickly toward the house where Miss Evelina, unveiled, shrank back into the farthest corner of an upper room.
With this arch forecast she withdrew, and Ann Eliza, returning to the back room, found Evelina still listlessly seated by the table. True to her new policy of silence, the elder sister set about folding up the bridal dress; but suddenly Evelina said in a harsh unnatural voice: "There ain't any use in going on with that." The folds slipped from Ann Eliza's hands. "Evelina Bunner what you mean?"
She pressed Evelina down on the faded cushions of the rocking-chair, and, kneeling beside her, began to rub her hands. "You're stone-cold, ain't you? Just sit still and warm yourself while I run and get the kettle. I've got something you always used to fancy for supper." She laid her hand on Evelina's shoulder. "Don't talk oh, don't talk yet!" she implored.
The man with the red feather in his hat had called her, and she had come. Now he was digging in her garden, making the desolate place clean, if not cheerful. Conscious of an unfamiliar detachment, Miss Evelina settled herself to think.
Ann Eliza, who had gone back to the machine, bent her head over the seam she was stitching; the click, click, click of the machine sounded in her ear like the tick of Ramy's clock, and it seemed to her that life had gone backward, and that Evelina, radiant and foolish, had just come into the room with the yellow flowers in her hand.
Grief held up its torch to the frail fabric of Ann Eliza's illusions, and with a firm heart she watched them shrivel into ashes; then, rising from her knees full of the chill joy of renunciation, she laid a kiss on the crimping pins of the sleeping Evelina and crept under the bedspread at her side. During the months that followed, Mr. Ramy visited the sisters with increasing frequency.
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