velina did not laugh. "It might be well for both you and me if
she were here," said she, seriously. However, she tempered a little
her decorous following of Mistress Perkins's precepts, and she and
Thomas went hand in hand up the lane and across the fields.

There was no dew that night, and the moon was full. It was after nine
o'clock when Thomas left her at the gate in the fence which separated
Evelina Adams's garden from the field, and watched her disappear
between the flowers. The moon shone full on the garden. Evelina
walked as it were over a silver dapple, which her light gown seemed
to brush away and dispel for a moment. The bushes stood in sweet
mysterious clumps of shadow.

Evelina had almost reached the house, and was close to the great
althea bush, which cast a wide circle of shadow, when it seemed
suddenly to separate and move into life.

The elder Evelina stepped out from the shadow of the bush. "Is that
you, Evelina?" she said, in her soft, melancholy voice, which had in
it a nervous vibration.

"Yes, Cousin Evelina."

The elder Evelina's pale face, drooped about with gray curls, had an
unfamiliar, almost uncanny, look in the moonlight, and might have
been the sorrowful visage of some marble nymph, lovelorn, with
unceasing grace. "Who--was with you?" she asked.

"The minister," replied young Evelina.

"Did he meet you?"

"He met me in the lane, Cousin Evelina."

"And he walked home with you across the field?"

"Yes, Cousin Evelina."

Then the two entered the house, and nothing more was said about the
matter. Young Evelina and Thomas Merriam agreed that their affection
was to be kept a secret for a while. "For," said young Evelina, "I
cannot leave Cousin Evelina yet a while, and I cannot have her
pestered with thinking about it, at least before another spring, when
she has the garden fairly growing again."

"That is nearly a whole year; it is August now," said Thomas, half
reproachfully, and he tightened his clasp of Evelina's slender
fingers.

"I cannot help that," replied Evelina. "It is for you to show
Christian patience more than I, Thomas. If you could have seen poor
Cousin Evelina, as I have seen her, through the long winter days,
when her garden is dead, and she has only the few plants in her
window left! When she is not watering and tending them she sits all
day in the window and looks out over the garden and the naked bushes
and the withered flower-stalks. She used not to be so, bu