died. There was not
much active grief for him in the village; he had really figured
therein more as a stately monument of his own grandeur than anything
else. He had been a man of little force of character, and that little
had seemed to degenerate since his wife died. An inborn dignity of
manner might have served to disguise his weakness with any others
than these shrewd New-Englanders, but they read him rightly. "The
Squire wa'n't ever one to set the river a-fire," they said. Then,
moreover, he left none of his property to the village to build a new
meeting-house or a town-house. It all went to Evelina.

People expected that Evelina would surely show herself in her
mourning at meeting the Sunday after the Squire died, but she did
not. Moreover, it began to be gradually discovered that she never
went out in the village street nor crossed the boundaries of her own
domains after her father's death. She lived in the great house with
her three servants--a man and his wife, and the woman who had been
with her mother when she died. Then it was that Evelina's garden
began. There had always been a garden at the back of the Squire's
house, but not like this, and only a low fence had separated it from
the road. Now one morning in the autumn the people saw Evelina's
man-servant, John Darby, setting out the arbor-vitae hedge, and in
the spring after that there were ploughing and seed-sowing extending
over a full half-acre, which later blossomed out in glory.

Before the hedge grew so high Evelina could be seen at work in her
garden. She was often stooping over the flower-beds in the early
morning when the village was first astir, and she moved among them
with her watering-pot in the twilight--a shadowy figure that might,
from her grace and her constancy to the flowers, have been Flora
herself.

As the years went on, the arbor-vitae hedge got each season a new
growth and waxed taller, until Evelina could no longer be seen above
it. That was an annoyance to people, because the quiet mystery of her
life kept their curiosity alive, until it was in a constant struggle,
as it were, with the green luxuriance of the hedge.

"John Darby had ought to trim that hedge," they said. They accosted
him in the street: "John, if ye don't cut that hedge down a little
it'll all die out." But he only made a surly grunting response,
intelligible to himself alone, and passed on. He was an Englishman,
and had lived in the Squire's family since he w