sk your aunt to enclose your letters in
hers."

"Do you write to her, father?"

"Yes, I write twice a week," John answered, thinking drearily of the
semi-weekly notes posted in Susanna's empty work-table upstairs. Would
she ever read them? He doubted it, unless he died, and she came back to
settle his affairs; but of course he shouldn't die,--no such good luck.
Would a man die who breakfasted at eight, dined at one, supped at six,
and went to bed at ten? Would a man die who worked in the garden an hour
every afternoon, with half a day Saturday; that being the task most
disagreeable to him and most appropriate therefore for penance?

Susanna loved flowers and had always wanted a garden, but John had been
too much occupied with his own concerns to give her the needed help or
money so that she could carry out her plans. The last year she had lost
heart in many ways, so that little or nothing had been accomplished of
all she had dreamed. It would have been laughable, had it not been
pathetic, to see John Hathaway dig, delve, grub, sow, water, weed,
transplant, generally at the wrong moment, in that dream-garden of
Susanna's. He asked no advice and read no books. With feverish
intensity, with complete ignorance of Nature's laws and small sympathy
with their intricacies, he dug, hoed, raked, fertilized, and planted
during that lonely summer. His absent-mindedness caused some expensive
failures, as when the wide expanse of Susanna's drying ground, which was
to be velvety lawn, "came up" curly lettuce; but he rooted out his
frequent mistakes and patiently planted seeds or roots or bulbs over and
over and over and over, until something sprouted in his beds, whether it
was what he intended or not. While he weeded the brilliant orange
nasturtiums, growing beside the magenta portulacca in a friendly
proximity that certainly would never have existed had the mistress of
the house been the head-gardener, he thought of nothing but his wife. He
knew her pride, her reserve, her sensitive spirit; he knew her love of
truth and honor and purity, the standards of life and conduct she had
tried to hold him to so valiantly, and which he had so dragged in the
dust during the blindness and the insanity of the last two years.

He, John Hathaway, was a deserted husband; Susanna had crept away all
wounded and resentful. Where was she living and how supporting herself
and Sue, when she could not have had a hundred dollars in the world?
Probably